Like many who watched America’s Next Top Model during its 2003 to 2018 run (and relied on binges during COVID-19 isolation for comfort), I have some issues with Tyra Banks’s mentorship style. If you’re not familiar with the show’s premise, the supermodel would have about a dozen aspiring models live in a house together and then, week by week, put them through Fear Factor–inspired challenges, questionable photo shoots, and citywide go-sees to whittle down which hopeful among the bunch would be best suited for life as a top model. The show yielded very few household names, and in the years since its original run (particularly during its 2020 resurgence), Tyra has been widely chastised for the hit series’ moral pitfalls—like the dramatic makeovers that participants were coerced into, race-swapping photo shoots that put some of the contestants in straight-up blackface, and emotional outbursts during which she’d disparage contestants who wouldn’t fall in line (see: “Be quiet, Tiffany.”)
A Netflix docuseries released this week, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, has shone a new spotlight on the show’s faults. And online reactions indicate that time hasn’t quite healed its wounds. Most of the Reality Check discourse centers around Tyra’s determination to dodge accountability and the unsettlingly measured, PR-trained tone she employs while reflecting on events that traumatized contestants. I figured most people were well aware of the problematic environment that Tyra created for young women hoping to follow in her footsteps. By now, we have years’ worth of think pieces and video essays lamenting her onscreen behavior that can attest to that. But what Reality Check clued me in on was just how involved Tyra’s fellow judges and executive bosses were in orchestrating the torture that she’s so often solely blamed for.
The show itself is Tyra’s brainchild. She says her goal was to “marry American Idol and The Real World and set it in the modeling industry.” But less than 10 minutes into the Reality Check docuseries, we’re introduced to the man who made her vision a reality: Ken Mok, ANTM’s Golden Globe–nominated executive producer/master puppeteer. From the start, Ken makes it clear that he underestimated Tyra when she originally met with him to pitch the series (“She’s probably not very bright,” he says he’d presumed). As the man who brought us ANTM and the equally controversial series Making the Band, it’s clear Ken is a guy who knows how to make engaging television. But it’s also clear that he played a heavy hand in exploitative ANTM scenes that Tyra’s widely denounced for.
Take the tragic story of Shandi Sullivan, a cycle 2 contestant who, during a chaotic party scene, had sex with a man who wasn’t her boyfriend. The show framed it as a cheating scandal and even filmed the (now infamous) emotional phone call Shandi had with her boyfriend to tell him what happened. But on Reality Check, Shandi alleges that the incident was actually sexual assault that production never put a stop to. She says she was blacked out during the encounter and couldn’t properly consent to sex. In describing the ordeal, Shandi was understandably still visibly distraught about its aftermath. But Ken Mok’s perspective wasn’t all that sympathetic.
“We treated Top Model like a documentary,” he explained. “And we told the girls that. On day one, when they’d show up, we’d go over the rules with them.” Tyra, as she does, volleyed the Shandi storyline blame to Ken, but as she notes, he *was* the show’s literal head of story, so his takeaway felt inhumane: “That was, for good or for bad, one of the most memorable moments in Top Model,” he says. A woman claims she was assaulted on screen, and he thought it appropriate to smugly brand the scene as memorable. Which begs the question: Why are the people who were present for and complicit in ANTM’s toxicity—executives like Ken or judges like Jay Manuel, J. Alexander, and Nigel Barker—not being held equally responsible in the online Reality Check discourse?
There’s the obvious answer that Tyra Banks is the internationally recognized face of the show. She led all of its marketing, she’s the one who sent the girls home at the end of each episode, and she’s also the one who sat them down to convince them to make wild physical alterations, like expanding the gap in their teeth. And she did everything but offer a valuable apology as she sat with a half-smile, her trench coat buttoned to the top, throughout Reality Check. (At one point, she even points a finger at us, the audience, for the show’s shock value: “You guys were demanding it. The viewers wanted more and more and more.”) But the Netflix docuseries made it clear that the show’s supporting cast—namely, the men in its ranks—were also culpable for a good chunk of the terror inflicted.
In one of the many instances of brutal body shaming that Reality Check revisits, Jay Manuel, the show’s creative director and Tyra’s former right-hand, voices his shock about a contestant’s weight gain. Cut to his confessional, and he seems to understand that the body discussions were “irresponsible” but states they were “relevant to the time.” The clear difference between his reaction to the show’s faults and Tyra’s is his visible discomfort and readiness to apologize (versus Tyra’s insistence on shifting blame). But this self-awareness doesn’t negate the fact that Jay was in a position of power on that set as well.
When Keenyah Hill, a cycle 4 contestant, was critiqued for calling attention to a male model inappropriately touching her, Nigel Barker, the show’s resident straight, arguably white-presenting man, sat on the judges’ panel and told her, “There has to be a way you can handle it. You have to be able to be in control.” In his Reality Check confessional, he somewhat doubles down: “Unfortunately, in the fashion industry, there’s always been a lot of issues with, you know, sort of harassment in every sort of shape or way, whether you’re a male model or a female model actually…but you as an individual should be able to stand up for yourself.” It’s a fascinating display of distancing, transferring fault to “the way things are” versus owning up to the fact that as a person of influence, he failed to defend a woman who was being taken advantage of.
ANTM’s supporting cast members are currently on a mini press tour that heavily focuses on Tyra’s missteps on- and offscreen, one news-making one being her not visiting runway coach and longtime friend Miss J. in the hospital after his 2022 stroke. On the Sherri show this week, Nigel Barker recommended that Tyra “be absolutely honest….It’s okay to admit you made a mistake….None of us were perfect, we were trying.” It’s commendable that he and the Jays are owning up to their errors so publicly today. But self-awareness doesn’t rewrite history. And the issue with holding only Tyra’s feet to the fire in ANTM critiques—as much as they deserve to be there—is that it paints the show’s abuse and subjugation as purely the byproduct of a supermodel’s narcissism rather than an accurate reflection of the industry and larger society that all of its key players rose to positions of power in. And it’s far easier for the show’s secondary characters to “take accountability” decades later, when the checks have all been cashed, and you can shift most of the backlash toward Tyra, the far more famous sole Black woman among them.
This is in no way a Tyra defense but an acknowledgment that she’s the model (no pun intended) target for blame in this matter. While addressing ANTM’s many faults, I’d encourage my fellow disappointed viewers to zoom out. To accurately assess the show’s harm, all parties involved should be inspected, regardless of the fallouts they’ve had with Tyra or how ready they are to apologize today. When the harm was done, the victims of their body shaming and exploitation didn’t know which powerful names would fess up to their wrongdoings years down the line. They were only left with trauma that tainted what they thought would be a moment in the sun.
So, justified as the ongoing villainization of Tyra may be, it should be treated with nuance. Nuance that considers the system she came up in and the ample support she had in her corner while she hurt people. Because bad guys aren’t created in a vacuum.
