Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model (dir. Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan)
Like so many of the cultural legacies from y2k and early 2000s, America’s Next Top Model gets saddled with in-part defenses like, “It was such a different time.” And it’s true. Whether it’s Tyra Banks throwing impressionable young women into vulnerable, harmful situations, the ‘mean one’ on television singing competitions insulting contestants’ weight and appearance, the distasteful celebrity voyeurship of Perez Hilton, or even the numbskullery of The Osbournes or Newlyweds, like it or not, that was just how it was. In hindsight it’s easy to see it that way and to pretend we were above it all. As if it were some last gasp of the classic television and pop culture landscape to have broad relevance to audiences for whom the internet was becoming uneasily more and more of a portal to the darkside. But it didn't have to be. It could've been something better.
The three-part documentary, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model makes a case for that, albeit somewhat naively. Filmmakers Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan have assembled many of the core identities behind the show—Tyra Banks, Ken Mok, Miss J Alexander, Jay Manuel and Nigel Barker; Janice Dickinson and Twiggy are notably absent, as is co-creator Kenya Barris—and several prominent cast-members from across the series’ 24-season(!) run. It appears from the outset to be keenly aware of how America’s Next Top Model is perceived when viewed through a contemporary lens of TikTok reaction videos and a less forgiving society of the 2020s. We see this in the first five minutes! Throughout its near three-hour runtime, we are repeatedly reminded that the world has changed and a generation of new terminally online audiences do not suffer such foolishness quite so easily.
It’s surprising then Reality Check doesn’t really apply those standards to itself. How can you acknowledge that the times have changed and then also let your star subjects so wildly off the hook. Banks, still a prominent celebrity of some description (she has a “hot ice-cream” franchise here in Australia for some unknown reason), comes of horrendously poorly in this. You can tell she isn't a producer of any sort. And quite rightly. It would be so incredibly compromised it she were. But Loushy and Sivan barely push her, letting her claim up and down that she didn’t know what was happening or simply refusing to answer questions or stare off into the middle distance. The three men that were most prominently by her side throughout the show aren’t quite as dismissive of the claims lobbed at the show, but they get off generally scot-free. They had to have known that audiences would pick their film apart just as they have done to the series, so it's strange and unfortunate.
Reality Check just doesn’t appear to have much of a point of view. Millennial nostalgia infused with Gen Z righteousness. Such is the problem a lot of the time with these bloated streaming documentaries. There are so many angles one could take and make a really fascinating documentary from using America’s Next Top Model as a case study of, but it never lingers on any of them for very long to really satisfy. The exploitation of reality television contestants is no doubt its most prominent and consistent storyline, but even then it only scratches the surface. In its best moments, Reality Check allows for real, genuine anger from its talking heads, women who suffered at the hands of television producers with nothing more than a buck to make. In its weakest, whether they intended to or not, the documentary at times plays right into the exploitation of the original series; taking the pain and the hurt of its contestants and regurgitating it for dramatic effect. I feel as if there is some real irony in choosing to play the footage of the reunion episode where, against her will, producers played video of one contestant’s on-camera drunken sexual fling and the emotional spiral thereafter while cutting back to that same woman, 20-odd years later, lamenting the devastation that it had on her and her relationships.
Reality Check is trash non-fiction. Streaming content for the permanently preoccupied that really isn’t any different to, say, one of Netflix’s many true crime series. Content that, yes, I admit, is still entertaining in its own way. Yes, I laughed at remembering all of the absurd challenges. Yes, I was taken aback by remembering what we as viewers consumed week after week. No wonder we got to where we are now, you know? It’s the easiest of watches and that will no doubt spur it to huge streaming numbers on Netflix. But when a nine-minute segment from Sherri Shepherd’s talk show has more to say than three hours of filmmaking, I can’t say it’s a success. It doesn’t transcend the expected. We’ll have to wait and see about that 25th cycle of Top Model that they have planned. Magnifying glasses at the ready—to quote the host of another reality show with its own fair share of backstage shenanigans: “I can’t wait to see how this turns out.”
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