Advertisement
If beauty is pain, America's Next Top Model was torture.
A new three-part doc on — Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model, currently the streamer's #1 show — purports to tell the , with creator and host in the hot seat.
There's only one problem here: Banks isn't apologizing. She won't cave to culture. In fact, she's doubling down.
Hallelujah.
Everyone has something to say about this doc — even ostensibly highbrow outlets such as NPR, Forbes and The have been forced to cover it in some way.
The UK Telegraph: 'The shocking story behind what was once the best reality contest on TV.'
Advertisement
HuffPost: 'Inside America's Next Top Model Isn't the Reckoning We've Been Waiting For.'
The Cut: 'Tyra Banks Isn't Sorry Enough.'
Sorry for what?
If beauty is pain, America's Next Top Model was torture.
During its 15-year run (the show premiered in May 2003 and became an instant phenomenon), Banks gave girls and young women with no connections, no means and no money the chance to become not just working models but, possibly, supermodels.
But to hear these aggrieved former contestants put it, they were shocked — shocked! — to learn that models were expected to be stick-thin, to possibly undergo cosmetic interventions, and have the way they looked evaluated and critiqued.
Advertisement
To say nothing of their apparent incredulity at how ruthless reality television could get.
'The biggest disaster ever is always the best thing,' says ANTM exec producer Ken Mok. 'People have [a] 104-degree temperature. They're throwing up. They need IVs. That's the best news I could ever have.'
Hey — at least he's being honest. Unlike, say, an Andy Cohen, who often dresses up his exploitation of reality stars as empowering for them — liberating, even.
'I think it's really a feminist show,' Cohen told The Hollywood Reporter of his Real Housewives franchise in 2024, 'because it can be about women finding their voice or finding their power or discovering their sexuality.'
If by 'feminist' Cohen means humiliating these women at their lowest moments — drunken fights and falls, getting arrested, going to rehab, getting divorced, viciously outing other cast members' drug habits or financial frauds or same-sex relationships — then sure, call it 'feminist'.
But are we really going to blame Tyra Banks for the institutionalized faults of the fashion industry and/or competitive reality TV - both of which have their fair share of known casualties?
Advertisement
The blood oath, the Faustian bargain of reality TV, is this: If you lack talent, intelligence, connections or status, but are dying to be famous, this genre will give you that shot. In return, you agree to be ritually humiliated, degraded and bullied. That's it. That's the deal.
And so, one contestant agrees to sit in a dentist chair for hours and have four teeth yanked to 'fix' her smile. Another, Cycle 6 winner Dani Evans, resisted closing the gap between her two front teeth, but lacked the fashion knowledge to cite '70s supermodel Lauren Hutton and her gap when pressured by Banks — and she ultimately went along with it.
