The ugly truth about America’s Next Top Model

"ANTM" once drew a global audience of around 100 million viewers. Photo / Getty Images

“Tyra mail!” Forget Big Brother. Never mind Love Island. America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) was, hands down, the best reality television contest out there. For a period in the 2000s, Tyra Banks’ search for a supermodel was popcorn TV at its finest, with a global audience of 100 million viewers.

We laughed, we gasped, we learnt to “smize” (smiling with our eyes). The show became increasingly unhinged with every series that went by. Netflix’s juicy documentary, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, looking back at the show isn’t exactly an expose, because we could all see that it was a hot mess. But you will still goggle at this reminder of what ANTM served up each week for our entertainment.

“For today’s photo shoot you will be posing as …” Crime scene corpses! Homeless people! Bulimics! Smokers with rotting yellow teeth! Was your mum a gun crime victim? Then please pose as someone who has just been very beautifully shot in the head. Or how about swapping ethnicities? Not simply blacking up either. “Erin, you’re going to be Tibetan like the Dalai Lama.”

And then there were the ordeals that the girls were put through in the name of beauty. The makeover episodes in the hair salon were always fun, but the producers decided that watching people weep as they were given a buzz cut wasn’t brutal enough. One contestant had four teeth pulled out. “It was insane,” concedes executive producer Ken Mok. Another initially refused to have the small gap in her front teeth fixed, until Banks told her to submit or be eliminated: “Do you really think you can have a CoverGirl contract with a gap in your mouth?” she demanded. A few seasons later, Banks required another girl to have a tooth gap put in.

This three-part documentary series includes interviews with Banks, who seemingly hasn’t aged a day, and the show’s three core judges: the fabulous J “Miss J” Alexander, make-up artist Jay Manuel and British model-turned-photographer Nigel Barker. Or Noted Fashion Photographer Nigel Barker, to give him his full name. There is no Janice Dickinson, although we’re treated to a brief medley of her critiques, including: “She looks kind of like a child prostitute”, “Fat? She’s huge!” and, “This is the worst photograph I’ve ever seen. You look deranged, your arms look amputated, your legs look amputated, and it looks like you have a penis.”

Alexander, Manuel and Barker come across well, and it’s nice to see them again. Banks? Not so much.

Tyra Banks. Photo / Getty Images

Banks oozes insincerity, just as she did on the show each week when her voice went all wobbly as she whispered: “Congratulations. You’re still on the way to becoming America’s Next Top Model.” ANTM was her baby, and she was willing to protect it at all costs. When the network demanded a shake-up, she fired the three judges (a disastrous move that caused the ratings to tank).

The show has come under fire in recent years from new viewers who have discovered the early series on TikTok. But you don’t have to be a Gen Z snowflake to realise that there were duty of care failures here.

Take the night when girls from series two were flown to Milan and treated to a boozy night in their apartment with a bunch of male models. Shandi, an unworldly 21-year-old who worked in a pharmacy in Kansas City, drank two bottles of wine and was clearly incapacitated as one of the men moved in on her.

“I remember him on top of me,” she says now, claiming that she blacked out. “No one did anything to stop it. And it all got filmed. All of it.” The cameras were also rolling the next day, when she phoned her boyfriend back home to tell him what had happened, then sobbed on the floor in a foetal position. And the day after that, when she was made to call the model and ask if he had worn a condom or had any STDs.

Banks is asked about this. “I do remember the story,” she says crisply. “It’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because that’s not my territory.”

Former ANTM contestant Shandi, at the time a 21-year-old pharmacy worker, alleges she experienced sexual impropriety on the show. Photo / America's Next Top Model

While the show was supposed to break down barriers and redefine what a supermodel could be – Banks herself was one of the few successful black models of her era, and not stick thin – it still indulged in plenty of fat-shaming.

Keenyah, who appeared in series four and was slim by any normal standards, was told that she was overweight. On a seven-deadly-sins-themed shoot, she was given “gluttony”. And on a shoot in South Africa where each contestant had to embody an animal, she was made to be the elephant. “It’s all about choices,” Banks told her. “You can get a burger and take the bread off.”

Keenyah and Shandi are among the former contestants who recount their experience of being on the show. Some raise suspicions that the outcomes were fixed, with unflattering final photos chosen as a way of booting them out. Most have complaints of feeling humiliated, exposed or manipulated.

Many of the girls came from difficult backgrounds, and their desperation back then was palpable. Some concede that the show changed their lives for the better, but the promise of a successful modelling career proved out of reach for almost all of them. Winning ANTM actually carried a stigma; the world of high fashion considered it desperately uncool, and the girls were never booked.

Season four contestant Keenyah was criticised by judges for being ‘overweight'. Photo / Getty Images

One contestant we don’t hear from is Tiffany from series four. You may not remember her name, but you may well have seen the viral moment that went on to become an internet meme in which Banks screams at her: “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you! How dare you?” This was prompted by Tiffany making light of her elimination from the competition, although anyone could see that she was simply putting on a brave face.

“I went too far. I lost it,” Banks admits now, though she says that she and the team had put a lot of time into nurturing Tiffany, who had a troubled life. Frustratingly, Alexander says the showdown went much further – “Some of the things that were said were really not well-intentioned. I will probably never repeat the lines that were actually said in that room that day” – but declines to provide details.

The shock of the documentary comes in episode three, when Alexander, still an impeccably turned-out diva, reveals that he suffered a catastrophic stroke in 2022. He spent five weeks in a coma, more than a year in hospital, and is still unable to walk. “I miss being queen of the runway. I’m the person who taught models how to walk, and now I can’t walk,” he says, although he is determined to get back on his feet.

Judge J Alexander, who taught contestants how to strut down the runway, suffered a stroke in 2022, leaving him unable to walk. Photo / Netflix

It’s terribly sad. And while Manuel and Barker visited their old friend in recovery, Banks did not. “She’s just sent me a text. She wants to come and visit me. But … no,” Alexander says. Nor does Banks reunite with the three of them on screen. Instead, she is planning series 25 of the show (who even noticed that it was rebooted in 2016 with Rita Ora as host?).

Netflix has turned out quite a few documentaries lately in which the stars think they are coming across well but are actually doing themselves no favours, including Simon Cowell and Victoria Beckham. Banks can join the list. Directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan know how to frame a villain – Sivan’s credits include a film about Osama Bin Laden.

“You were making good TV at my expense,” one of the contestants says of the programme. And she’s right. But in the early series, at least it really was good TV.

‘Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model’ is on Netflix

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