Netflix‘s Reality Check: Inside America‘s Next Top Model is being slammed by viewers, and everyone has the same complaint.
Before TikTok. Before Instagram. Before reality television had even figured out what it was, America’s Next Top Model arrived and rewrote the rulebook.
From the moment it debuted in 2003, Tyra Banks’ brainchild was unmissable. Each cycle dropped a fresh group of hopeful young women into an intense competition of photoshoots, runway challenges, dramatic makeovers, and brutal elimination panels, all broadcast to millions of viewers across 170 countries.
By the time it wrapped its 24th and final cycle in 2018, ANTM had spawned dozens of international spin-offs, turned ‘smizing’ into a verb, and gifted the internet one of its most enduring memes: “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you! How dare you?”
It wasn’t just a TV show. It was a cultural institution.
But behind closed doors, the show was hiding some dark secrets. A new Netflix documentary set to expose them dropped this weekend, but viewers have all noticed the same problem…
Tyra Banks: supermodel turned mogul
Behind it all stood Tyra Banks, one of the most recognisable supermodels of the 1990s, a Victoria’s Secret icon, and a trailblazer who became the first Black woman to be featured solo on the covers of GQ and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
Banks didn’t just create ANTM, she became the face of it, serving as host, executive producer, and the show’s beating heart. Her larger-than-life personality dominated every frame, from theatrical photoshoot reveals to the explosive judging panel moments that would later live rent-free on social media forever.
By the show’s peak, Banks had become one of the most powerful women in American entertainment, turning a modelling competition into a global empire.
A vision of diversity?
According to Tyra herself, ANTM was never supposed to be just entertainment. She has said repeatedly that she created the show after experiencing discrimination in the modelling industry as a Black woman, a world that did not embrace diversity the way she believed it should.
Her stated goal was to build a platform that celebrated different ethnicities, body types, and backgrounds at a time when the fashion industry was still overwhelmingly narrow in who it considered beautiful. And to its credit, the show did push boundaries in ways that had rarely been seen on mainstream American television at the time.
But former Cycle 18 winner Sophie Sumner, who first competed on Britain‘s Next Top Model before crossing the Atlantic, puts it plainly per AOL: whatever Tyra’s original intention, ‘getting ratings and making money probably became the overall goal.’
Sumner believes the host ‘deep down’ did want to champion diversity, she just ‘didn’t know how to do it.’
The controversies that defined ANTM
ANTM‘s legacy is impossible to discuss without confronting its long list of scandals. Body-shaming was practically a fixture of the judging panel. Dangerous physical stunts, including persuading contestants with known fears of heights to shoot atop a 338-metre tower in a rainstorm, were standard production practice.
And then there was the ‘ethnicity-swapping’ photoshoot, which saw white models photographed in blackface makeup, a decision that Sumner called ‘trash on their end,’ adding pointedly: “Everyone knew better.”
Contestant Shandi Sullivan has spoken about being filmed in a deeply compromising personal situation abroad, saying she ‘blacked out’ before the incident and that nobody stepped in to stop it, and the cameras just kept rolling.
Multiple former contestants have described being fat-shamed, harassed by male models on set, and grabbed without consent.
First-cycle contestant Ebony Haith, who was 23 at the time, was told on national television that her skin texture looked ‘ashy’ and that she was ‘too harsh.’
More than two decades later, she says she is ‘still healing.’ No one from the production has ever called to apologise.
Tyra’s reckoning
The host herself has not been immune to scrutiny. When old clips began circulating en masse during the Covid-19 pandemic, introducing the show to an entirely new generation who watched with fresh, horrified eyes, one question echoed across social media: “How did this ever get made?”
At the 2025 ESSENCE Black Women in Hollywood Awards, Banks acknowledged the criticism head-on. “Hell no. I said some dumb s***,” she admitted, while still defending her broader intention to expand diversity on TV, per MailOnline.
It was a rare moment of candour from a woman who had for years been more inclined to defend the show than dismantle it.
The documentary pulling back the curtain
Now comes Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, a three-part Netflix docuseries that launched February 16 and has already shot up the platform’s charts.
The series features Banks alongside former judges Jay Manuel, Miss J Alexander, and Nigel Barker, as well as a parade of former contestants, including Whitney Thompson, Giselle Samson, and Shandi Sullivan, all sitting down to address the show’s most uncomfortable chapters, from the blackface photoshoot to sexual harassment allegations to the culture of psychological manipulation that pervaded the set.
Documentary directors Daniel Sivan and Mor Loushy have been clear that neither Banks nor any of the original producers had editorial control over the final cut.
“I think once she decided to participate, she came to speak up,” director Mor Loushy told BBC Newsbeat. “After Covid, so much about the show was on TikTok. She also wanted to speak up and give her side of the story.”
Banks admits in the documentary that certain moments, including her infamous on-air meltdown at contestant Tiffany Richardson, ‘went too far.’
Not everyone featured in the documentary is inclined toward full contrition. Judge and photographer Nigel Barker, who joined the show in 2004, called it ‘revolutionary and authentic’ in an appearance on ITV’s This Morning, even as he admitted some scenes were ‘painful to watch.’
“It was 100% authentic,” Barker said. “When I first joined the show, I had no idea I was even going to be a judge.”
And while he acknowledged that things ‘got more extreme’ as the seasons went on, he framed it as a product of the era: “It was the same time as shows like Survivor, a lot of extreme television was out at that time.”
His advice to viewers? Look at it ‘with kindness and nostalgia at the same time as feeling sorry for the things you did that were wrong.’
The complaint everyone has about the documentary
And here is where things get interesting, because the dominant reaction to the documentary is not outrage over the show’s scandals.
Those conversations have been happening for years. The complaint that viewers and critics keep returning to, again and again, is something else entirely.
People feel like the documentary is less about accountability and more about reputation management.
“Was the #RealityCheck ANTM documentary meant to help Tyra Banks clear her name? Cause idk if it did,” one viewer noted on social media. “It’s clear Tyra Banks is using this documentary as a way to plan her comeback but there’s no way she can redeem herself,” echoed another.
Critics argue that the framing of the documentary subtly shifts blame onto the culture of the time, the pressure of ratings, the machinery of television, everywhere, it seems, except squarely on the people who made the decisions.
Ebony Haith, who has never received so much as a phone call from production in 23 years, sits in stark contrast to the polished, careful narrative the doc seems constructed to tell.
The question everyone is asking is not ‘was the show bad?’ We know it was. The question is: who is this documentary actually for?
Is Cycle 25 actually coming?
Perhaps the most stunning revelation in the documentary has nothing to do with past controversies. At the close of the series, Banks appears to tease a full-blown revival of the show. “You have no idea what we have planned for Cycle 25,” she tells the camera.
It echoes comments she made to E! News in 2024, where she said: “We have tried, so it’s not us. It’s the powers that be. I’m not the biggest boss in the room, so it’s not my doing. Maybe one day.” Given the documentary’s immediate streaming success, that “maybe one day” suddenly feels a lot closer.
Watch the Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model trailer here…
Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model is now streaming on Netflix.
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