When America’s Next Top Model premiered in 2002, it was a juggernaut. The show was a part of a cohort of programming that built the foundations of reality television as we know it today. A new documentary, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, asks the show’s creator, Tyra Banks, her collaborators, and former contestants to look back at some of the biggest moments in the show’s history and reckon with its legacy.
More than 20 years after the show first aired, viewers have found many elements of the show did not age well. In that time, our standards around reality television have surely changed. So, should we be evaluating the show through a 2026 lens?
Scaachi Koul, a culture writer for Slate, spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King about how much accountability we can expect from people like Banks and what a show like America’s Next Top Model tells us about ourselves. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
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Tell me why we’re talking about America’s Next Top Model again?
Culture moves in 20- to 30-year cycles. And so there’s always nostalgia that comes up with these things. That is a show that premiered right after 9/11. It speaks to a very particular slice of early to mid-aughts reality show culture.
We are in a phase where we’re rethinking all of those things. It is an interesting time to reassess the culture that continues to dominate. All of the things we watch, they are all guided by these reality shows from 2000 to 2010.
What was America’s Next Top Model?
It was a reality competition show. They would bring on a bunch of teenagers and young women. They would get these girls, they put them in a house together, and they would have to do these modeling competitions every week.
The show created a whole lexicon for us that we didn’t have before. It was such a strange fever dream of a show. It is exactly like a lot of reality competition still, but it was so specific and weird and saliently, helmed by a lunatic.
Tyra [Banks] was cuckoo bananas, and that’s why we loved her. She was amazing TV. She was always trying to trick the girls. There’s one where she pretends to faint in front of them. And then they put it in the show.
So much of what the documentary has to grapple with, ultimately, is what was happening on that show was sheer lunacy. And some of what went on in the show is in retrospect rather appalling.
Let’s talk through some of the things that the documentary tries to address, and I want to start with a model named Shandi.
Shandi has maybe the most devastating story in the documentary. She was someone that I still remembered. She was on the second season of the show. She seemed primed to win, in fact.
Near the end of the show, they take all the models to Milan and while she was there, she got really drunk and there were a bunch of male models. And in the show’s version, when you watch it in real time, it’s like a drunken hookup. She cheats on her boyfriend in Milan and that’s how it’s framed. And her shame is, I can’t believe I did this to my boyfriend.
When you watch the documentary, it is recast not — I wouldn’t even say it’s a 2026 lens. I don’t necessarily think that it is. I think a lot of people still view sexual assault like this and still view drinking and women like this, but she’s an adult, and so now really, in her adulthood, she’s able to look at this and be like, yeah, that wasn’t a place where I could consent.
Is anyone held to account for the way Shandi was treated?
A lot of people want more responsibility from Tyra, and I get that she’s the face of it and a good person to ask, but these shows are constellations of people. There’s a lot of people who work on these shows and there’s a lot of people who have responsibility for it, and some of them are in the doc and maybe some of them aren’t.
What happened with Shandi is there’s five, six, 10 people who have to say okay to that. And you keep saying it and you keep saying it. That is what’s interesting to me, how the machine lets that pass.
There was a model, Dani, who had a beautiful, charming, delightful gap in her front teeth. And she was made to close it. Tell me about how the documentary deals with young women being told something distinct about you is not right, it’s not good enough.
It’s a tough gig that Tyra gave herself because she’s trying to tell these women, this is how the industry works and these are the things you need to do to be able to thrive in it. At the same time, she’s propagating those same things.
I believed her and I still believe her when she would say, you need to lose weight because you’re not going to get a cover girl campaign if you’re bigger. Which was true at the time. It’s still true for a lot of campaigns.
Tyra says, “This is what I knew with the information that I had.” I kind of believe her. The show was still interested in moving that narrative forward and making sure that was the tension. The point of the show was the tension between who you were and who you are supposed to become.
You watched the documentary. What did you want to get out of it and what do you feel like you got out of it? Did it feel like an honest reckoning?
Intent and result are always different. And I don’t know what the intent was, but I think with the result, she comes off looking like what we knew her to be, which is pretty craven, and pretty aware of what she’s done, and not that sorry.
That’s what we bought. And the idea that she is going to be this font of accountability — I don’t think that’s likely. A lot of her answers are like, “Well, that was the time.” That’s always the argument people make.
I never really get that in hindsight, because it’s still the time. The president is posting gifs or AI videos of the one and only Black president we’ve had as a monkey. So I don’t actually know that it is of a time. It’s just of a different place.
That kind of stuff doesn’t live in reality TV like it used to, but it permeated everywhere else and it has always been there. [Banks] was responding to what she had, but we are always responding to what we have and we always have this.
It actually has never really improved. One day we get to decide if we’d like to improve it. I think those retrospectives are worthwhile because they help us see how the Overton window has moved and where it’s moved, and how we can maybe shift it back.
