And, as evidenced in a new Netflix docuseries about the show, no one will take accountability for it — not even Tyra Banks.
If anyone expects an apology from Tyra Banks in Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, they will surely be disappointed. The new Netflix docuseries chronicles the evolution of America’s Next Top Model — and the toxic messaging about beauty it pushed upon audiences — featuring interviews from some of its judges and contestants, executive producer Ken Mok, and host-slash-creator Tyra Banks. To a millennial viewer such as myself, watching it felt like a sort of seance — a call into the void, making contact with the meltdown voyeurism, diet culture, and reality TV ghosts of the early aughts.
The reality competition series ran for 24 seasons (or “cycles,” as they’re called) between 2003 and 2018. Contestants vied for the title, a cash prize, and a loosely defined modeling contract. Each week, they endured challenges — mostly themed photo shoots — that have since been lampooned across social media for their cultural insensitivity, all-around weirdness, and lack of relevance to modeling. (Cycle four contestant Keenyah Hill shared in the docuseries that she couldn’t use her photos from the show in her modeling portfolio because they were so thematically nuts.)
Every cycle, beauty makeovers were the highlight — and the biggest point of cognitive dissonance. Banks says in the docuseries, as she has many times in the past, that she made a point of casting models whom the fashion industry writ large excluded at the time — Black models, brown models, queer models, curvier models… only to bind them in the same impossible beauty standards she claimed to denounce. Weaves, extensions, and drastic haircuts or color changes were ostensibly forced upon contestants for the sake of making them more fashion-forward. Cycle six’s Joanie Dodds and Danielle Evans were vaguely threatened with elimination unless they agreed to permanent, painful dental work. (Dodds was asked to straighten her smile, which required surgically removing several teeth and replacing them with implants; Evans was asked to have the gap between her two front teeth surgically closed because it wasn’t “marketable,” which she vocally opposed on camera.)
