Netflix is no stranger to a damage control documentary, but its latest offering could be the premiere example of crisis management disguised as millennial nostalgia-bait. Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, the streamer’s new three-episode docuseries, is pitched as an exposé of the notoriously toxic competition show, which drew millions of viewers at the height of its cultural dominance in the 2000s. With access to both executive producers – series creator Tyra Banks and head of story Ken Mok – various judges, and numerous former contestants, Reality Check is well-poised to give us novel revelations about a series that was criticised at the time for instances of overt discrimination, as well as purposefully putting contestants in harm’s way. But what’s marketed as a tell-all is rarely ever bold enough to deliver on that.

The show is the newest addition to an expanding genre of reputational-rehabilitation vehicles for celebrities staging some form of public comeback. In Banks’ case, she seems to be testing the temperature for a potential ANTM revival, which she hints at towards the end of episode three. Victoria Beckham got the Netflix redemption treatment last year, as her own three-parter attempted to defend her from lesser allegations (mainly of being an unsavvy business-owner) by emphasising her contributions to the fashion industry alongside her struggles with it. In a similar vein, Reality Check focuses on Banks’ cultural impact as a Black supermodel: a diverse trailblazer during and following her come-up in the 1990s, as well as a victim of that era’s particularly vicious tabloid culture.

“The show goes along with Tyra’s framing of the ANTM backlash as a post-COVID phenomenon spearheaded by a younger generation of wokescolds”

Unlike Beckham’s series, Banks’ is not self-produced, but one can’t help but feel that her participation is contingent on the interviewers treating her with kid gloves. The show goes along with Tyra’s framing of the ANTM backlash as a post-Covid phenomenon spearheaded by a younger generation of wokescolds, liberally employing B-roll of TikTokers parodying Tyra or expressing distaste for some of the production’s more egregious choices. Electing to style models in blackface may be the most infamous example, but Reality Check recounts a dereliction of care in multiple troubling ways: continuing to film as a blackout drunk contestant was sexually assaulted, excoriating models over a scintilla of body fat, sanctioning the emotional abuse of marginalised participants, and manipulating discriminatory tensions between them in the name of “story”.

What Reality Check can’t admit to are uglier accusations: that ANTM allegedly used alcohol, isolation and lies to untether its participants from reality; that its competitive environment could have encouraged eating disorders among them; that each contestant only received a $38 daily stipend to buy food while Banks reportedly took home millions. In 2021, former contestant Sarah Hartshorne spoke out about conditions on the show. “Production kept us in the dark about almost everything because they wanted to keep us on edge,” she said. “Us being confused, tired, stressed, sleep-deprived and hungry just made for better TV.” 

The closest the series gets to a mea culpa is in discussing Shandi Sullivan, the season two contestant who left ANTM following her sexual assault during a trip to Milan. The then-19-year-old describes production setting the girls up on wine-and-dinner dates at their shared accommodation with a group of local men, and being too inebriated to consent or even feel it when she “knew [sex] was happening” to her. Production not only continued filming while the assault was taking place, but spun Sullivan’s assault as a cheating scandal in the edit (going as far as naming the episode “The Girl Who Cheated”) and wouldn’t allow her access to a phone in the aftermath of the trauma. When questioned about the circumstances around “Shandi’s story,” executive producer Tyra Banks claims that production is “not [her] territory” and defers to Ken Mok, who argues that intervening would have been a violation of their documentary’s ethics.

But while criticism of Mok and Banks’ alleged exploitation has reached a fever pitch, there’s every indication that, on a systematic level, the same 2000s attitudes remain in the fashion industry. In October, Vogue Business reported that size inclusivity on catwalks “remained minimal” in the SS26 season, comprising 97.1 per cent straight-size models, two per cent mid-size and 0.9 per cent plus-size, noting a conservative culture shift linked to the spread of “white supremacist ideas.” The past week has also seen the manosphere-adjacent right-wing streamer Clavicular make his NYFW debut, and his deranged “looksmaxxing” technique involving injectables and a hammer immortalised in the pages of GQ. 

Fashion is and has always been rife with abusive characters, unpaid workers and impossible standards. It finds a bedfellow in reality TV, another woefully unregulated industry that preys on the aspirations of the working class. While there has been some legal recourse regarding reality contestants’ rights as employees in the context of Love Is Blind – which allegedly paid participants £250 per week for “up to 20-hour days” – contemporary survival shows demonstrate that the behind-the-scenes desire to manufacture drama continues to take precedence over contestant wellbeing.

Take the 2023 Netflix series Popstar Academy: Katseye, in which teen girls compete against each other over two years for a place in a six-person K-pop idol group. The contestants, some as young as 15, are trained by a dance instructor who behaves like a drill sergeant, and encouraged to push their bodies to the point of injury. At a certain point, production stops delegating mentors to inform them of their eliminations – the task is instead performed by an anonymous voice that plays out of a rotating splotch on a black screen – and the contestants all weep as their friends’ dreams are dashed before their eyes. It’s morally convenient to dismiss ANTM as a relic of the 00s, but some eerily similar practices still continue in television today.

“Fashion is and has always been rife with abusive characters, unpaid workers and impossible standards. It finds a bedfellow in reality TV”

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model takes great pains to address the cultural value of what Tyra and her contemporaries were creating, and stresses the fact a show like ANTM had never been made before, as a kind of anticipatory defence. For the most part, the show seems to assert that the cruel and unusual conditions on America’s Next Top Model were not conceived at the whim of its executive producers, but merely incidental to the workings of the fashion machine in the early 00s. It was a different time, we didn’t know any better, etc.

Also currently streaming on Netflix alongside Reality Check is High & Low: John Galliano, a portrait of the once-disgraced British designer by Kevin Macdonald. Like the drunken anti-Semitic rant that begins the Galliano film, Reality Check introduces the viewer to its primary subject by showing them at their lowest point. In Banks’ case, this is her much-memed outburst in 2005, in which she aggressively berates contestant Tiffany Richardson for a blasé reaction to her own elimination. The effect of these fall-from-grace framings isn’t exactly flattering, but structurally they allow their subjects to compartmentalise their misconduct as a blip in a grand narrative. Neither Galliano nor Banks is especially convincing in their contrition – and why would they be? Their industries have taught them there’s really no need.