Trending Now: Netflix’s ‘America’s Next Top Model’ Exposé Speaks Louder for Its Celebrity Consultants Than the Victims – Fans React

Netflix’s new docuseries about “America’s Next Top Model” has plenty to say about an alleged culture of exploitation, sexism, and racism lurking behind the scenes of one of reality TV’s formerly proudest hits. But across three episodes, “Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model” catalogs story after story of young women being body-shamed, manipulated, and pushed to emotional extremes in a way that once again treats their trauma as alarmingly trivial.

From invasive dental procedures mandated by “Top Model” judges — to troubling late-night encounters with men the girls met while traveling abroad — “Reality Check” presents its limited cast of contestants earnestly, but it tells their side of things only in part. More than 300 people competed on “Top Model” over the course of the show’s 24-season run, but just 10 contestants appear in Netflix’s new account. Worse, “Reality Check” co-directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan subject the women who do appear to many of the same toxic tricks that got us here in the first place. Structurally, “Reality Check” looks less like a documentary than an unscripted reunion wrapped in prestige true crime packaging.

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Nowhere is that imbalance clearer than in the project’s repeated return to the reality show’s most infamous moment: Banks’ on-camera confrontation with contestant Tiffany Richardson during Season 4. The clip (“Be quiet, Tiffany. Be quiet. Never in my life have I yelled at a girl like this!”) has long functioned as “Top Model” shorthand for the show’s characteristic cruelty and Banks’ volatility. “Reality Check” presents the moment as the product of a pressure-cooker workplace that made Banks feel personally responsible for helping women navigate the industry.

But the docuseries does not include Richardson herself, once again making her powerless in a national narrative. The former contestant does not appear to reflect on the moment that has come to define her public image, and instead she responded to the series via Instagram (h/t Vulture). Calling Banks a “bully” and challenging her to speak face-to-face, Richardson’s sentiments don’t feel like closure, and “Reality Check” never meaningfully grapples with what it means to keep reopening psychological wounds while sidelining the real people who “Top Model” hurt.

Even as the series continues to villainize Banks, the competing women of “Top Model” rarely get the sustained attention given to the show’s more familiar faces: Jay Manuel, Miss J. Alexander, and Nigel Barker. Longtime series fixtures who served as judges, mentors, and on-camera fashion authorities throughout much of the original show’s run, all three personalities are listed as consultants on “Reality Check.” Barker and Manuel also donated archival footage, and the series treats the trio gently without making that relationship explicit until the credits.

Manuel, Alexander, and Barker are given extensive space to contextualize their actions, explain their discomfort with certain challenges, and frame their participation in those scenes as constrained by a business model that was bigger than them… but supposedly, not bigger than Banks. Their agency is rarely challenged in “Reality Check,” but their emotional journeys are still foregrounded over the voices of victims and the contrast is striking. They are allowed to reckon with how they felt about controversial “Top Model” moments — including photoshoots that saw them personally challenging contestants to embrace blackface, glamorize domestic violence, and work through more thoughtless shock value — without being pressed on why they failed to intervene back then.

The show devotes significant time to the three consultants’ past hardships as well as their ongoing bond, and that’s crystallized in a moving segment about Alexander’s harrowing recovery after a devastating stroke in 2022. That moral generosity matters because these creative personalities were not peripheral observers to the “Top Model” world, as they themselves admit in “Reality Check.” They were authority figures whose approval shaped contestants’ fates and their failure to interrogate their own motives then and now suggests an enduring lack of self-awareness that undermines this new project.

Manuel, Alexander, and Barker were all laid off by Banks and producer Ken Mok in a high-profile restructuring for “Top Model” in 2012. “Reality Check” frames the trio’s participation in this series as incidental to that earlier schism, but their demeanor while recounting some of the events related to that emotional employment saga come across as tone-deaf at best and axe-grinding at worst.

Notably not credited as a consultant, Banks occupies a more constrained and paradoxical position in “Reality Check.” The docuseries repeatedly depicts the former host declining to answer certain questions from her interviewer: a framing choice that subtly positions her as evasive. Simultaneously, that restraint conveys the sense that Banks knows she’s behind enemy lines and could be a victim of bad editing like anyone else. The seasoned supermodel offers some of the most thoughtful analysis in the series, explicitly tying the worst “Top Model” moments to a deeply exploitative industry. But Banks also seems careful to not take responsibility for anything the “Reality Check” research team can’t prove.

The result is an ethically muddy exercise that might satisfy the rhythms of subscribers who like reality TV of varying tastes and ethical levels, but it falls sorely short of documentary’s basic obligations and intellectual rigor. Netflix’s role looms large over all of this, of course. The streaming platform has a well-documented history of recycling real trauma for content, particularly in the unscripted space. “Reality Check” fits neatly into that troubling pattern, effectively suspending the damage of “Top Model” in amber and treating the exploitation at its core like any other piece of familiar IP.

Even with the aughts back in fashion, the real danger of “Reality Check” isn’t that it reignites harm but normalizes doing so with little regard for the consequences. When it comes to explaining how and why the culture at “Top Model” was allowed to get progressively worse for over 15 years, “Reality Check” is noticeably selective. Responsibility is framed as both diffuse and oddly concentrated, with Banks and, to a lesser extent, Mok positioned as primary targets for scrutiny. It’s an incomplete narrative that cries out for more thorough investigation, as others involved in crafting the problematic show receive more grace.

Documentary has long carried an expectation of empirical truth and public service. The format can help society reckon with abuse long after headlines fade, but when projects like “Reality Check” confuse exposure with accountability, they undermine that trust and make it harder to inspire change. Here, Netflix seems to want viewers to feel informed about the history of “Top Model” only to the extent that it benefits their agenda. A clear-eyed portrait of how capitalism and fame corrode good intentions could be valuable, but a glossy retrospective of retired humiliation suggests indifference is back in fashion.

“Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model” is now streaming on Netflix.

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