Netflix’s America’s Next Top Model documentary casts Tyra Banks as a villain.
In the chilly gentle of hindsight, America’s Next Top Model seems like a fever dream of a actuality present. The total franchise seems like an unbelievable 30 Rock joke: A gaggle of fashions of their late teenagers and early 20s share a home and are run by way of weeks and weeks of challenges on the behest of ur-supermodel Tyra Banks, who spends most of her time educating the women tips on how to “smize.” How a lot blackface is concerned? Much greater than you’d ever think about potential.
For 24 seasons, ANTM was among the many most influential and dominant actuality exhibits of the aughts. Millions of us watched the present’s producers, Banks and fellow government producer Ken Mok amongst them, nudge ladies into intense dental work, make them reenact devastating traumas of their previous through high-concept photoshoots, and dangle an unbelievable dream in entrance of hungry and infrequently downright determined reality-show contestants. If they gained the present, they’d get a modeling contract and a head begin—plus, a private relationship with Banks herself.
Unsurprisingly, Gen Z and Gen Alpha have discovered the present since its finale in 2018, whereas loads of millennials dedicated to a rewatch by way of the pandemic. For years now, ANTM has been a lightning rod for dialog and criticism of the early-aughts-TV meat grinder. If you grew up with ANTMit is easy to overlook how large of a deal the present was when it launched, and the way it created its personal arm of actuality programming. It’s additionally simple to overlook how bonkers it was for Banks to ask ladies to stroll down a slim runway flanked by water whereas inside an enormous plastic bubble.
The nostalgia cycle normally ends with a documentary, and so this week’s premiere of Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model on Netflix is the inevitable subsequent step after renewed TikTookay virality. Featuring interviews with former solid members, judges, and tv executives, in addition to Banks and Mok, the documentary does what you desire a good documentary to do: It reminds us what occurred, and why it occurred, and in the end renames it as each a culture-buster and a reinforcement of the worst of predatory leisure.
But it additionally names at the very least one individual because the dangerous man, time and again. Reality Check does not balk: It’s Banks who’s left holding the bag. In the present’s hagiography, ANTM is her child, born from her experiences as a mannequin within the ’90s, a approach for her to pay it ahead. Banks reminds us, repeatedly, that she wasn’t some deserve presenter of the present; she was an government producer, key within the present’s growth and manufacturing. That possession of this system means it was additionally her fault when issues went awry, which in response to Reality Check, they did fairly typically.
Banks is the documentary’s fundamental villain, however her participation in her personal reassessment solidifies what she’s at all times been: an evil genius. If she’s going to be held chargeable for the present’s many deficiencies, she additionally units herself up as a part of her ongoing dialog. She aspired to do one thing that compelled folks to think about fashions and modeling as a official profession, and to set girls up in careers as public figures. The present was imperfect, however by collaborating in a documentary about it, she nonetheless will get to have the ultimate phrase.
Reality Check ticks all of the containers of an ANTM retrospective. The present’s most indelible moments are inevitably dissected, some with interviews that includes the ladies concerned. Banks’ well-known rant at Cycle 4 contestant Tiffany is mined, because it has been in interviews previously, however so are much less notorious scenes like Cycle 4’s Keenyah being referred to as fats over and over (they made her costume up like an elephant, Jesus Christ), Cycle 8’s Dionne posing as a gun-violence sufferer after telling producers her mom was paralyzed by a gunshot, or Cycle 10 winner Whitney having no garments to suit her “plus size” body at a photoshoot that the present organized. (She was round a dimension 6.) At finest, a couple of ladies bought a head begin into the business, like Cycle 1 winner Adrianne Curry (ultimately a star on The Surreal Life) or Cycle 3’s Eva Marcille (later solid on Real Housewives of Atlanta). At worst, it devastated them. The network-provided dental work is oft-discussed, an encapsulation of the present’s double-edged sword: Yes, ANTM might assist poor ladies get dental work they might ordinarily solely dream of. But the work was solely half carried out, and solely carried out for cameras, they usually by no means felt like that they had a option to say no. What did all of it actually repair?
Some of the sequence’ most brutal disclosures give attention to Cycle 2’s Shandi, the brutally shy Walgreens worker from Kansas who was steadily changing into the season’s most promising prospect. If you watched the present in actual time, you would possibly do not forget that Shandi’s story ends when she travels to Milan with the remainder of the present and cheats on her boyfriend by having drunken intercourse with a male mannequin in a scorching tub. To hear Shandi inform it now—23 years later, reflecting on a snapshot of being barely authorized and drunk and jubilant on a actuality present—it wasn’t a enjoyable hookup or merely a youthful indiscretion. She was too drunk to consent, too drunk to actually bear in mind what occurred, and positively too drunk to permit a crew to movie her, which they did. Later, when the producers needed to take her to a health care provider, they filmed her calling the mannequin to ask him if that they had used a condom and if he had any STDs.
After the episode aired, she turned synonymous with what her boyfriend referred to as her on the telephone when she instructed him what occurred: a “slut,” and a “stupid bitch.”
Banks is current for the interviews however solely intermittently prepared to just accept blame for what the present turned. She is aware of the black-and-brownface was nuts, and she or he has a couple of clear regrets on how she dealt with artistic selections on the present, and the way the women had been handled too. But when the complaints turn out to be extra granular and thus extra devastating—as with Shandi’s story, or fellow choose Jay Manuel detailing how coldly Banks approached him after he needed to go away the present—she’s tougher to pin down. When Miss Jay tells the manufacturing about his latest stroke, and that Banks has but to go to him, Banks is not pressed about her perceived indifference.
But it does not virtually matter how a lot or how little duty Banks takes within the documentary; she’s already tied herself to the eye cycle of even the disapproval of her child. By staying engrossed within the dialog round her personal present—even when the dialog is about its myriad failures!—she’s additionally afforded one other alternative to take part in her hagiography. A documentary means one other likelihood to speak about ANTM’s noble beginnings, so Banks will get to remind us of the place she got here from. Don’t overlook: She was making this present when being the most popular Black woman on the planet nonetheless meant she was having a troublesome time within the modeling business. Her recommendation, absurdist although it was, typically was rooted in her actual expertise. She wasn’t simply telling the women to drop extra pounds to be merciless—she was providing the one info she had, at a time once we thought it was the data we would have liked. ANTM He was the primary of his type, and Banks was perhaps the one one in every of his type. Criticize the work, positive, however to take action, it’s a must to give Banks her flowers first.
Reality Check traffics successfully within the nostalgia-cum-accountability programming that is turn out to be a cottage business unto itself, like Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, Fit For TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loserand Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story. (I ought to know—I’m one of many producers of that final one.) Cultural discourse is inevitable; launch one thing into the ether with no anticipated reproach and you will be disillusioned. But Banks has at all times understood that it is higher to face firmly within the heart of the outrage cycle than to let it engulf you. A celeb like Banks is extra involved with legacy than with actuality. In documentary, she will get a little bit of each.
