Ever since Netflix dropped its documentary series, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, the supermodel has been under fire. But is there another motive behind all the controversy?
“I was rooting for you,” Tyra Banks famously berated a contestant on America’s Next Top Model some 20 years ago. But who, now, is rooting for Tyra Banks?
The supermodel and reality-TV mogul has been under fire from all sides ever since Netflix dropped its documentary series, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. Long-circling scrutiny of the show’s tasteless extremes, frequent body-shaming and blatant failures of duty of care have come to rest on Banks herself, with viewers, Top Model contestants and even her former friends all expressing outrage at her apparent lack of repentance.
Does Banks really want to move on in her new life as an ice-cream impresario in Australia – or is all this controversy over Top Model a Trojan horse for a reboot?
Deadline reports that Reality Check has drawn more than 14m views in its first week on Netflix, topping the platform’s English-language charts. (By comparison, Being Gordon Ramsay debuted at number 10 with just under 3m views.) Banks received no questions in advance of her four-hour interview, had no powers of approval over how she was presented, and was only able to watch the series at the same time as the rest of the world. “She had no say, no influence, no anything,” co-director Mor Loushy told Vanity Fair. Banks may well have received Reality Check as just that, with critics and viewers focusing on her failure to take adequate accountability for her part in the toxic reality-TV juggernaut.
