Winner Takes All

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model

“You wanna be on top?” The question that’s reverberated through television speakers and for the past two decades. America’s Next Top Model opened each episode asking us – the audience, future contestants, and young fans; what would you do to win it all? Or maybe, more importantly, what wouldn’t you? It’s been 23 years since the first cycle of ANTM premiered, with a cast of characters emerging on our screen and Tyra Banks at the helm. The show concluded in 2018, but since then ANTM has remained a fixture in the public imagination: the bizarre, and at times insensitive or offensive challenges, the blow-out fights. Every famous and infamous moment is a gif, a reaction image, or makes up a compilation on YouTube. 

This March, Netflix released Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, a “tell all” style documentary where grievances with the show were going to be addressed. As I watched the documentary it became clear that the main judges, Tyra Banks, Jay Manuel, and Miss J, were maintaining a hard-line of defense. Sure, a lot of controversial aspects of the show were wrong-footed in hindsight, but they were only facilitating television that the audience wanted, right? I began to wonder about cancellation in retrospect, and what it means to re-examine past media and behavior with modern sensibilities. 

Within twenty minutes of the first episode, Tyra Banks identified a shift in the cultural reception of ANTM while reflecting on the pandemic. c. “A lot of people were part of the next generation, they didn’t watch it back then and it went overnight from this thing that everybody loves to, like, just a whole different lens. Look how wrong this is. What I think is important is to understand where that came from,” she said. This statement was followed by a graphic reading of “The Early 2000s,” alluding to the way that the broader American culture at the time affected the production of the show. Fatphobia, racism, featurism, and exploitative working conditions were commonplace. The experiences that Tyra Banks went through as a black woman entering the 90s modeling industry were mirrored and perpetuated in the show. It begs the question of what kind of change you’re enacting if you’re forcing the younger generation to jump through the same hoops that you did, and deal with the same exploitation. 

This documentary also calls into question the ethics of reality television and the symbiotic relationship between the producers and the viewership. There was a need to remain on the network which would only happen if they made money for the network. Capitalist greed is a catalyst for exploitation, moonlighting as entertainment. Many of the contestants had limited opportunities outside of the show to realize their dreams, which shaped the dynamic between them and production. There was a power imbalance, an inability to say no, and also a lack of control over the narratives that they were the stars of. 

Natalie Lynn, a youtuber who posts under the name Contrapoints, stated in her video “The Aesthetic" that: “In history, there are ages of reason and ages of spectacle, and it's important to know which you’re in. Our America, our internet, is not ancient Athens - it's Rome. And your problem is you think you're in the forum, when you’re really in the circus.” While I’m hesitant to divide all of history into two neat categories, I think this idea, of our age being one of  spectacle, is an interesting way to examine reality television and our relationship to surveillance. From Big Brother to America’s Next Top Model to Love Island, at every turn it seems audiences gravitate to a simulated version of reality, where a group of people are in an isolated environment with high stakes and constantly rising tensions. But what does that say about the viewer's appetite? And whose responsibility is it to decide when enough is enough?

Sydney Brewer