Reality Check: America’s Next Top Model Review – by Michael Sowell
The year was 2003, and the world was obsessed with “smizing.” When America’s Next Top Model first strutted onto our screens, it felt like a cultural earthquake. Here was the misfit show that promised fashion, led by a woman who had, by her own account, broken the color barrier in an industry built on exclusion. But as the new Netflix documentary, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, makes devastatingly clear, that “revolution” was constructed on a foundation of orchestrated trauma, systemic negligence, and a brand of “tough love” that, in 2026, looks far less like a career launchpad and far more like a psychological hazing ritual.
The Mirage of Cultural Relevance
At its peak, ANTM wasn’t just a show; it was the blueprint. It was culturally massive because it offered audiences a peek behind the velvet curtain of high fashion, a world previously reserved for the elite and the impossibly thin. We cheered for the underdogs, the “plus-size” models (who were usually just a healthy size 6), the girls from modest backgrounds whom Tyra Banks personally promised to transform. In the early 2000s, this felt like progress. It felt radical.
But as Reality Check: America’s Next Top Model states in the 3-part documentary, the show didn’t actually challenge the industry’s toxic standards. It repackaged them as primetime entertainment and called it empowerment. What viewers once consumed as high-stakes competition was, in reality, a series of carefully engineered humiliation rituals designed to break young women down, all in service of a better ratings cycle and a more viral “smize.”
The “Tyra” Problem: Accountability vs. Performance
One of the most jarring elements of Reality Check is observing Tyra Banks in the present day. She agreed to be interviewed, and the documentary makes her pay for that decision. Rather than the warm, maternal mentor she so carefully cultivated on screen, we see a mogul who is remarkably, almost impressively, skilled at deflection. Tyra repeatedly cites “the times” or “the audience” as the driving forces behind the show’s most egregious moments, while conspicuously minimizing her role as Executive Producer in favor of the softer label of “talent.”
Watching her sidestep accountability is a masterclass in reframing. The documentary revisits her infamous 2005 confrontation with contestant Tiffany Richardson, once seen as a moment of passionate mentorship, and recontextualizes it completely. Through a modern lens, it reads as something far more troubling, an executive leveraging the full weight of her power over a young woman with nothing, while cameras rolled to ensure the “drama” hit the ratings jackpot. The discomfort of that rewatch is the documentary’s entire thesis compressed into a single scene.
The Contestants: Trauma as Story Beat
If the problematic photo shoots and forced makeovers seemed bad in retrospect, Reality Check goes deeper, into the complete absence of any meaningful duty of care. The most disturbing segment centers on Shandi Sullivan and the now-infamous Milan trip, in which footage of a clearly distressed and intoxicated young woman was not only captured but edited and broadcast under the title “The Girl Who Cheated”, a framing that pinned moral failure onto the victim while erasing the catastrophic failure of the production team surrounding her.
The documentary forces an overdue reckoning; these weren’t “characters.” They were vulnerable young women whose real-life crises, from Keenyah Hill’s ignored experiences with sexual harassment on set to Ebony Haith’s encounters with racial microaggressions, were treated not as human emergencies, but as narrative gold. Production didn’t intervene. Production aired it. That distinction matters enormously.
A Network’s Silence and the Architecture of Chaos
Reality Check wisely refuses to limit its critique to Tyra Banks. While she is the face of the backlash, producers like Ken Mok and the network itself are implicated as the architects of the underlying dysfunction. What emerges isa masterclass in institutional negligence, executives who collected the ratings and the advertising revenue while leaving behind a trail of women whose long-term mental health was never a line item in anyone’s budget.
The show’s famous “makeover” episodes are reframed with particular sharpness. What was sold to viewers as a transformative opportunity was, in fact, body modification. Women are pressured into irreversible physical changes under the implicit threat that resistance would be read as ingratitude, disqualifying them from the very opportunity they’d sacrificed to pursue. The network cashed the checks. The contestants lived with the consequences.
And the careers the show supposedly launched? Many contestants were effectively blacklisted by the actual fashion industry, which had watched them become reality TV caricatures rather than bankable models.
The Broken Inner Circle
Perhaps the most disheartening moment in Reality Check is the complete dismantling of the show’s creative “family.” The documentary traces the fractured relationships between Tyra and her long-term collaborators, Jay Manuel, Miss J. Alexander, and Nigel Barker. These men who spent years presenting a unified, fabulous front at the judging panel, while behind the scenes, something far more destructive was taking hold.
To hear Jay Manuel describe the fear-based culture on set is a gut punch. The show’s decline wasn’t simply a matter of an aging format failing to keep pace with a changing media landscape. It was the rot at the center spreading outward. As the series shifted from a legitimate search for new talent into a campy, desperate scramble for cultural relevance, the team that had built it slowly dismantled, leaving behind a legacy of unrealized potential, broken relationships, and crushed dreams.
The Staggering Tone-Deafness of “Cycle 25”
In what many critics are already calling the documentary’s most surreal moment, Reality Check closes with Tyra teasing the possibility of Cycle 25. After three hours of excavating the psychological toll the show inflicted on its participants, the hint of a reboot lands not as a triumphant tease but as something closer to a provocation.
If ANTM returns in 2026, it walks into a media environment that has fundamentally lost its appetite for trauma-as-entertainment. Reality Check hasn’t just reframed the show’s legacy; it has actively dismantled the runway. Whether Tyra Banks and the network can rebuild it with genuine structural empathy, real accountability, and meaningful protections for participants, or whether they’ll simply find a sleeker new way to manufacture pain for profit, remains the documentary’s ultimate, unanswered question.