The docuseries that reveals the dark side of “America’s Next Top Model”

Un themed photo shoot “homeless” (with real people chosen from the street to pose), another on the effects of drugs, yet another on intentional deaths: gunshot, strangulation, overdose. All this really happened, filmed and shown on an internationally renowned television program with more than 5 million viewers. This was it America’s Next Top Model: the show created by the top model Tyra Banks. A reality show created with the aim of revolutionizing the fashion sector and enhancing a more inclusive idea of ​​beauty. The result? Twenty years after its debut, America’s Next Top Model it’s more a remorse than a nostalgic memory: it’s a archive of scandals and questionable choices finally put under the light of the sun by the Netflix docuseries Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model.

Behind the scenes of reality, the docuseries that reveals the dark sides of America’s Next Top Model

The three-episode docuseries calls for answers Tyra Banks together with historic judges Jay Manuel, Miss J and to the photographer Nigel Barkeras well as some former competitors. The story delves into the logic of the reality TV machine and shows the evolution of the program in his 24 seasons. A machine that has affected the lives of many young women: not only the competitors, but also the spectators who grew up watching TV: all those little girls who have normalized and internalized an idea of ​​toxic female beauty. In the series the judges reflect on their responsibilities, admitting that many choices of the time are incompatible with today’s sensibilities. But in the end, everything is more or less absolved by the sentence: «the fashion industry worked like this».

Tyra Banks’ revolutionary idea: create a space for all women

The documentary tells the origin of the program well. The intuition of Tyra Banks was, at the beginning, truly innovative: uniting the competition of American Idol with the docu-reality format of The Real Worldapplying them to the world of fashion. Almost all the networks rejected the project at first. Except everyone UPNthen the channel with the least audience. The first season, filmed in a New York hotel, was an unexpected hit and launched Tyra’s empire. In the documentary, the top model explains well what the purpose of the program was for her: create a space for all bodies, for all women of any size or ethnicity. Banks, who had suffered much discrimination as a black woman, wanted to demonstrate the existence of multiple types of beauty.

What went wrong? When the laws of the audience rule

Tyra’s noble idea was soon swallowed up by the logic of television: numbers, spectacularization, scandal. The competitors were subjected to tests that today would be considered unacceptable: psychological pressure, racial and sexual orientation discrimination (a contestant says she was pressured to come out in front of the cameras), body shaming, traumatic makeovers. Bodies exposed to discomfort, fear, physical limits. At first it seemed like a creative game. Fashion as disguise. Then the entertainment machine asked for more. It was no longer enough to amaze: it was necessary to disturb. The psychological impact of criticism on young and vulnerable bodies was enormous, and some photoshoots — from the theme “homeless” al blackface — today they appear truly terrifying. When trauma becomes an aesthetic, it stops being a story and becomes consumption.

Reality built on drama: the aesthetics of pain

The contestants weren’t just aspiring models: they were girls with real fragilities, which became narrative material. Their fragilities slowly become plot twists functional to ratings. Their crises: the episode with the best share. One of the voices of the docuseries is that of Danielle Evanswinner of the sixth season. A young girl, less than twenty years old at the time, forced to surgically correct the bridge between her teeth under threat of removal. Humiliated and forced to change a part of her body on live TV. Also Shandi Sullivan is interviewed. His story is one of the most remembered: when he was a competitor suffered sexual assault during the program’s international trip to Milan. Violence filmed by cameramen, edited and broadcast. Shandi was engaged at the time, her boyfriend found out on television what had happened. The production pushed her to call her boyfriend in front of the cameras, handing her over to public judgment. The trauma became a spectacle.

The toxic ideal of 2000s beauty

American Next’s Top Model it is, of course, a product of the 2000s. An era that built a ideal of unattainable beauty, in which the female body was under continuous observation: magnified, judged, corrected. The magazines fussed over the defects. An entire generation has grown up hearing criticisms and judgments of all kinds aimed at the female body in prime time. It took time for the critical gaze to emerge. Only when a new generation revised the program, during the pandemic yearsit became clear how unacceptable many dynamics were. Simply wrong in how they normalized humiliation, control and judgment of the body.

The future of beauty: the idea of ​​a 25th season

Reviewing those dynamics today has a certain effect. Not just because of what was shown, but because of how easily it was accepted as “normal television”. With hindsight, it seems clear how much that model contributed to making a spectacle of even what would have required care, protection and respect. That Tyra Banks imagine one “season 25” matters less than the lesson that needs to be learned from this docuseries: entertainment is not neutral, it shapes and directs future views. If we really return to that stage, the challenge will not be to gain an audience, but to demonstrate that we have learned from our mistakes.

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