This week, Netflix dropped a three-part, much-anticipated (a minimum of by us millennials) documentary on actuality tv present America’s Subsequent Prime Mannequin (ANTM). The brand new sequence, Actuality Test: Inside America’s Subsequent Prime Mannequin, reveals Tyra Banks – the creator of the fact sequence, its govt producer, and its longest-running host, in addition to a famed supermodel – alongside the opposite judges and over a dozen contestants, discussing the creation, success and backlash surrounding the present.
For these unacquainted, of which I assume there are only a few, provided that generations who could not have tuned in stay will definitely be conversant in the viral sounds (particularly “We had been all rooting for you”), stunning moments, and TikTok dissections of it lately, ANTM was the actuality TV present of the early ‘’00s. It ran for 15 years, had 24 cycles, and was a cultural phenomenon, at its top drawing in additional than 100 million viewers worldwide. The premise was easy: a supermodel competitors present through which aspiring fashions (between 10 and 16, relying on the season) lived collectively and competed for a career-launching modelling contract. To win, they took half in weekly photograph shoots, runway challenges, and excessive makeovers.
This isn’t the primary exploration of the present’s poisonous previous. There have been podcasts like Curse of: America’s Subsequent Prime Mannequin (2025), an investigative 13-episode sequence from iHeartPodcasts and Glass Podcasts, many assume items, essays, social media posts and extra. However that is essentially the most vital entry any exploration has had: Banks, catwalk coach J. Alexander, inventive director Jay Manuel, photographer Nigel Barker, govt producer Ken Mok, and contestants comparable to Giselle Samson, Shandi Sullivan and Danielle “Dani” Evans all participate.
Tyra Banks opens the sequence by saying, “I haven’t actually stated a lot, however now it’s time.” Actually, she doesn’t say a lot all through the three episodes; a minimum of nothing we didn’t already know. Nobody actually takes accountability for the therapy of contestants. While the present factors to the encircling tradition that existed on the time, which created such bigotry, fatphobia, racism, inflexible magnificence requirements and misogyny for the present to perpetrate it, nobody explains or apologises on to the ladies harmed. Actually, Banks even hints at a comeback, saying, “After the present, I had so many various concepts for my life. I’m obsessive about pivoting. I really feel like my work will not be accomplished. You don’t have any thought what we now have deliberate for cycle 25.”
At one level, she tells the digital camera, “Hindsight is 20/20 for all of us. It simply so occurs that numerous the issues which might be 20/20 for me occurred in entrance of the world.”
I’m undecided that “hindsight” is sufficient of an excuse to accuse what the contestants skilled: On Actuality Test, former Cycle Two contestant Shandi Sullivan revisits one of the crucial distressing chapters of her time on ANTM. Whereas filming in Milan, she says that manufacturing organized for a bunch of males to return to the fashions’ residence, the place everybody drank and socialised. After consuming alcohol on an empty abdomen, she says she “blacked out” and later remembers solely fragmented sensations, together with waking to discover a man on high of her. “I don’t even really feel intercourse taking place, I simply knew it was taking place, after which I handed out,” she stated.
Footage from the episode later reveals Banks citing being cheated on with the solid, then turning to Shandi and telling her, “Everyone messes up, Shani. I am not judging you, however I believe that we now have to struggle towards our carnal wishes.”
