Since its release on February 16, Netflix’s Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model has topped Netflix’s charts and garnered heated attention online. The docuseries chronicles the making of America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) and examines the early 2000s TV show under a 2026 microscope. Was the show really just a product of its time? Or does the docuseries reveal an unchecked exploitation of the hundreds of women it claimed to serve?
If you were a reality TV watcher in the early 2000s, you remember ANTM. The show, which debuted on UPN in May 2003, quickly became a global success and franchise, running for 24 cycles in the U.S. and inspiring countless other spin-offs abroad. The show’s goal was simple: collect a group of undiscovered women with model-like features and turn one into a supermodel.
Credit for the success of the show goes to supermodel Tyra Banks, creator, executive producer, and on-screen host of ANTM. Bank’s intentions seem pure. Her goal was to diversify the modeling industry and create an on-ramp into an industry that had historically valued whiteness and thinness above all else. The show actively challenged the narrow and racist beauty standards of the 90s and early 2000s.
“We opened the door. We slammed it wide open,” said Banks on the impact of ANTM in the docuseries.
Prioritizing the Bottom Line
Determining the success of the show is nuanced. Did it challenge an outdated beauty standard? Absolutely. Did it elevate a diverse group of women to a national stage? Yes. But its commitment to making “good TV” created a drive to find new ways to cash in on the exploitation of these women.
“Before it’s a modeling show, it’s a television show,” Ken Mok, executive producer, clarified in the docuseries. In 2003, reality TV as we know it was just starting to take shape. A constant need to increase viewership and ratings took priority over creating successful models. The show’s bottom line governed creative decisions.
Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Such creative decisions resulted in unconventional, if not unsafe, situations. Photoshoots became outlandish, forcing girls to pose as crime victims, drug addicts, and ethnicities different than their own. Physical conditions became more precarious as well. Girls dressed in raw meat, posed with dead fish, and were exposed to harassment on set.
Physically, girls signed away much of their bodily autonomy when joining the show. Aspiring models cut their hair, pulled their teeth, and pushed their bodies to dangerous limits, often resulting in hospital visits.
The show calls into question the ethics of capturing footage for reality TV. At what point are those with power supposed to intercede?
A Fresh Start for ANTM?
Despite massive criticism of the show, Banks announced that ANTM will return for Cycle 25. Though an official green light has yet to appear, the show seems to be returning to our screens soon. Banks claims to be grateful for recent criticism and committed to turning a new leaf as the show moves forward.
“The only way you get better is by somebody calling you out on your s—-,” said Banks. “It is important.”
It’s also important to protect the women whose dreams and talents made the show possible. Past ANTM contestants and winners credit the show as actually closing doors for them in the modeling world instead of opening them.
“I couldn’t use any of the photos from America’s Next Top Model in my actual modeling portfolio,” Keenyah Hill, a contestant on ANTM Cycle 4, said in the docuseries. “The photoshoots were way overly-themed, way too much makeup.”
Dani Evans, the winner of ANTM Cycle 6, found it difficult to be successful in the industry despite winning multiple modeling contracts and moving to New York. Her agency admitted to other models that they had to “treat Dani differently” because of her time on ANTM and claimed her status as a “reality star” limited her modeling opportunities.
If ANTM continues, viewers hope this docuseries is the reality check it claims to be and serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when profits are prioritized over the health and well-being of a show’s contestants.
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