Nearly two decades after its peak, the show that defined a generation of reality TV is finally being held to account.
Netflix’s new three-part documentary Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model arrives at a moment when the culture has largely moved on from the show’s 24-season run, but the people it left behind have not. Through often devastating interviews with former contestants, producers, and judges, the series dismantles the glossy veneer of one of the 2000s’ most-watched competition shows and asks uncomfortable questions about what entertainment was really being sold to audiences week after week.
The documentary wastes no time establishing its thesis: ANTM treated its contestants less like aspiring professionals and more like clay to be molded. Body shaming and extreme physical makeovers weren’t aberrations; they were the show’s operating logic. Nowhere is this clearer than in the stories of Cycle 6 contestants Danielle “Dani” Evans and Joanie Dodds (now Sprague), both of whom underwent dental procedures at the show’s insistence.
I knew very early on that, oh, Top Model has a stigma. I’ve already lived twenty years in the real modeling industry and gotten my a** handed to me, because I was never able to rise to the level that I could have or should have.
What angers me the most is the conversation that Tyra had with me years later. She told me that, she’s like, ‘I knew that there were certain doors that you couldn’t even get into because you did Top Model, and I did nothing about it.’ And she said to me, ‘I always rode the fence with you.’
And that’s when I said, ‘Respectfully, Tyra, you have no f*cking idea how painful it has been for me.’ You have no f*cking idea.
But for you to admit to me all these years, fifteen years later, ‘I know the hell that you’ve been going through. I know that you couldn’t even walk through the threshold of certain doors.’ And so to have her, a black woman, say to me, over the phone that, ‘I knew you were struggling and I did nothing about it.’ What?
You don’t gotta support me. You don’t even gotta like me, but don’t see me and my suffering and just walk past me. That’s so f*cked up.
— Danielle “Dani” Evans on life after winning ANTM
Evans, the eventual winner of Cycle 6, came to the show with a gap in her front teeth, something she considered a signature feature. The judges disagreed. When Evans initially refused the procedure, host Tyra Banks pressed her on whether a gap-toothed model could ever land a CoverGirl contract. It was framed as career advice; Evans experienced it as coercion. She ultimately relented, later describing the decision as a moment where her autonomy was “toyed with, consciously.”
The cruel irony is that just a few seasons later, the show sent another model to the dentist to have her gap widened. The standard was never really about teeth. It was about ratings.
