Even for those who didn’t watch the show religiously, there’s a scene in America’s Next Top Model that has broken through from reality TV infamy to hall-of-fame virality.
It’s when Tyra Banks, model-turned-TV-mogul, loses her temper in spectacular fashion at contest Tiffany Richardson, after misunderstanding her post-elimination response as something to be read as ungrateful. “I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this!” she screams. “When my mother yells like this, it’s because she loves me. I was rooting for you, we were all rooting for you, how dare you!”
The confrontation might have happened in 2005, before gifs and memes were as deeply embedded within our culture, but it’s managed to survive and mutate, a copy-paste punchline easily found on many a social media thread. Yet it doesn’t take much to figure out that something darker is happening in the scene and something even darker was taking place off-camera.
“There was a lot more that was really said,” says Jay Manuel, one of Tyra’s ex on-screen right-hand men, in a new docuseries. “I will probably never repeat the lines that were actually said in the room that day … People have tried to make it something funny but it really wasn’t.”
The re-assessment of America’s Next Top Model, from revolutionary reality show to hotbed of toxicity, had slowly been taking place in the years since it ended but it gathered steam during the pandemic when so many of us had that much more TV watching time on our hands. It’s not as if the millennials who grew up with the show, which aired from 2003 until 2018, weren’t aware of how problematic so much of it was but it took a younger generation to look at it with fresh eyes, and what Banks now calls “a 2020 lens”, to bring about a social media reckoning. The cavalcade of aghast YouTube and TikTok breakdowns of crucially awful scenes (bodyshaming, racism, pretty much everything judge Janice Dickinson said) forced Banks, who created and hosted the show for 22 of its 24 cycles, to respond. Snippets, from panels or elsewhere online, showed her to be overly defensive, highlighting the good in an attempt to paper over the bad, but it wasn’t enough and finally, she’s agreed to be part of Netflix’s juicy three-part series Reality Check, the most substantive ANTM autopsy to date.
“There was a lot of beauty in this show,” co-director Mor Loushy says to the Guardian in a video interview. “There was a lot of ugliness in this show. But let’s talk about all of it.”
It’s understandable why Banks would have an initial impulse to play defence. She’d grown up in the fashion industry at a time when there were very few Black women allowed in and while she had opened doors (she was the first Black woman on the front of Sports Illustrated and GQ and was one of the very few women of colour to achieve supermodel status) she’d also had plenty closed in her face. “I would go home and just feel defeated,” Banks says of her early modelling days in Paris. “I was constantly being told no you can’t do this because you’re Black. There were not a lot of Black models back then. We were being paid so much less just because of the colour of our skin.”
The idea of a reality show about models – pitched as The Real World meets American Idol – was her way to not only find “payback” as she calls it but also show that diversity within the industry was essential. The process of trying to sell it to a network led to yet more rejection for Banks (models were seen as “unsympathetic” characters) but after it was finally sold to Paramount offshoot UPN, it become a surprise ratings hit and provided an underserved young female majority audience with something unusually relatable.
But while the show did offer up the idea of diversity – women of colour, queer and trans contestants, plus-sized models – it also upheld the same standards Banks was apparently railing against.
“They started as misfits with very good intentions,” co-director Daniel Sivan says. “They were starting as disruptors but as power grew, they became bullies.”
The series documents how Banks and her panel of judges, including two gay men of colour in Jay Manuel and J Alexander aka Miss J (another revolutionary addition at the time), found ways to make magnetic television (in its heyday, the show was watched in 170 countries) but often at the expense of the women, who were as young as 18, at its centre. “They did these girls so dirty,” says an influencer clipped in a montage.
The ways in which they were done dirty go from micro to macro and denigrating to downright dangerous. There was Dani Evans who was told she needed to close her tooth gap in order to stay on the show, something she eventually allowed them to do as part of a “makeover” (“It’s my life and it was toyed with consciously,” she says while Tyra says she was “between a rock and a hard place” when she gave the advice). There was Keenyah Hill who went from being bullied at school for being too thin to her exaggerated “overeating” being turned into a cruelly edited storyline (comments graduated from “shaped like a boy minus the breasts” to “Keenyah needs to lose weight”). There was Dionne Walters who had to pose as a shooting victim in the “crime scene” week after she had told producers that her mother had been shot years earlier (“I think they wanted to see some type of mental breakdown,” she says).
There was a weight test for contestants in earlier seasons, making young women like Shannon Stewart, who was struggling with an eating disorder, even more conscious of her body. There was also the infamous “race-swapping” week which saw contestants wearing make-up and styling to cosplay as other races, a genuinely shocking clip to rewatch (“This was my way of showing the world that brown and Black is beautiful,” Banks says of her initial intention before later admitting “It’s an issue and I understand 100% why”).
Then there was Shandi Sullivan who says what was framed as a drunken indiscretion with a male model was in fact sexual assault and the cameras kept filming anyway (“No one did anything to stop it,” she says, tearfully).
“It was definitely one of the most difficult interviews I’ve ever done in my life,” Loushy says. “It was a really a red line that was crossed in so many ways.”
One of the most chilling moments in the series is a shameful defence for the decision to keep the camera rolling, not just during the assault but after as Shandi calls her boyfriend in tears. The makers were filming a “documentary” so they shouldn’t interrupt what’s taking place.
“Being a documentary film-maker is not a get out of jail free card,” Sivan says. “Even in this interview, which Mo conducted, Shandi broke down crying and Mo said cut and we stopped because you don’t just keep filming because it’s good TV.”
When Banks is asked about this particular incident, she says “it’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because that’s not my territory”.
Banks was not alone in making Top Model of course, the show became a collaboration between her and producer Ken Mok as well as those involved with the network. It makes blame “complex” says Loushy. The women they speak to clearly have a great deal of anger for Banks, who flipped between protective house-mother and betrayer-in-chief, but the show existed at a corrosive pop culture moment where women’s bodies were being scrutinised and ridiculed and reality TV was in its wild west era (“You guys were demanding it,” Banks says. “The viewers wanted more and more and more”). Banks was an easy fall guy, according to Loushy and Sivan.
“Tyra was one of the only women who was a show-runner back then,” Sivan says. “The misogyny goes in both directions, not just to justify the harm that was done on the show.”
He adds: “The whole concept of telling someone that she is too fat wasn’t even badmouthing back then. It was just part of the culture. And harassing people, having a man grab a woman’s ass is something that you would see on Home Alone 2, it was a joke.”
There may now be a more formalised duty of care for some reality shows but is our culture, with social media now a prevalent force, really that much better now?
“The show did present and showcase so many different images of beauty,” Sivan says. “And now, even when you look at Instagram and it’s supposed to be all so democratised, everybody’s extremely skinny, fit, going to the gym, getting plastic surgery. Our own daughter is obsessed with make-up and she’s 10 years old.”
Banks does show more self-awareness than we’ve seen from her before when talking about the problems that arose. She even addresses the uncomfortable clip of her screaming at Tiffany. “I went too far,” she admits. “I lost it. It was probably bigger than her. It was family, friends, society, Black girls, all the challenges we have. So many people saying that we’re not good enough. I think all that was in that moment. That’s some Black girl stuff that goes real deep inside of me, but I knew I went too far.”
Perhaps her most surprising admission is that we might not have seen the end of America’s Next Top Model. “You have no idea what we have planned … for cycle 25,” she says.
When I ask Loushy and Sivan if they think the show might actually return, they seem sure that those involved would want to do it again. “Cycle 25 is Tyra’s dream,” Sivan says. “I think it’s also the judges’ dream. I think they all want to do another cycle.”
Loushy admits that even in her research, binge-watching all 24 cycles, she still understands why it was a success. “I couldn’t stop watching,” she says. “It still works even with the lenses of today and I enjoyed every second of it.”
But is it possible to resurrect and avoid the same problems? What would that show even look like in 2026?
Sivan says: “Our only tip that if anybody revives this show I hope it focuses more on the personality of the contenders and not on how they look.”
