This three-part documentary has remarkable access to people involved with this 00s TV hit. It’s an awful tale of body-shaming, humiliation and toxic treatment
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f you’re a millennial woman, America’s Next Top Model may have been your first experience of appointment TV. The show, which ran for 10 years from 2003, was an early reality juggernaut and made a household name of the supermodel Tyra Banks, its creator and host. At its peak, Top Model drew more than 100 million viewers globally, and left a niche but indelible impact on culture. “Smize”, meaning to “smile with your eyes”, is in the Collins dictionary, while Banks’ infamous tirade (“We were all rooting for you!”) at an unruly model still circulates as a meme.
With its high-concept photoshoots and extreme makeovers, Top Model was ahead of its time in manufacturing viral moments. Today, however, the exacting critiques and body-shaming makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing, as gen Zers bingeing the show through the pandemic have pointed out. This latter-day reckoning is the peg for Netflix’s three-part docuseries, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model.
The series boasts remarkable access: Banks, the catwalk coach J Alexander, creative director Jay Manuel, photographer Nigel Barker and executive producer Ken Mok all sit down to interviews, along with dozens of former contestants. It suffers, however, from the usual Netflix issues: it is overlong, unevenly paced and frenetically edited. What could have been a powerful 90-minute film instead spans three hours, yet the zippy, TikTok-y treatment robs it of impact.
