If you think of America’s Next Top Model, chances are a few mainstays come to mind: Miss J’s iconic runway walk, “smizing,” and Tiffany. The latter is a name so identifiable in the America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) lexicon that fans don’t even need to know her last name to immediately know the specific moment being referred to. To set the scene: the year is 2005, Cycle 4 of ANTM. After failing to complete a task reading difficult designer names off a teleprompter, contestant and favoured front-runner Tiffany Richardson is eliminated alongside Rebecca Epley in a dramatic first-time double-elimination. Epley, standing in front of host Tyra Banks, cries. Richardson, clearly defeated but trying not to show it, doesn’t. Hugging her fellow contestants goodbye, she plays down their tears. And Tyra, seemingly upset by Richardson’s lack of emotion and what she views as her mocking the experience, goes off, screaming the now iconic phrase: “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you! How dare you!”

In real-time, sitting on the couch in our childhood living rooms, the moment was titillating, coming across as an incredibly harsh and over-the-top reaction from the supermodel. Mind you, we loved the drama. In the years since, as social media has taken over and a new generation has been introduced to Banks and her brand of smize, the moment has become a meme; with “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!” becoming the comedic go-to to throw out when you’re frustrated with your friends dating choices or inability to stop getting back together with her toxic ex. 

In Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, a docuseries released on Netflix on February 16, Banks’ rant at the aspiring model is once again morphed into something else: the culmination of decades of industry pressures and expectations coming to a head for Banks. As the supermodel tells the cameras in the three episode docuseries, this tense moment in ANTM history came from a place of love and wanting to see Richardson—who’d auditioned for the season prior—to succeed.“I went too far,” Banks says in the doc. “It was probably bigger than her. It was family, friends, society, Black girls, all the challenges that we have. So many people saying that we’re not good enough. I think all that was in that moment.”

It’s a poignant scene in the doc, and one that reframes the interaction in, if not positive, a more sympathetic light towards ANTM and Banks, the latter of whom has become a tumultuous—sometimes not-so-popular—media figure. And that seems to be exactly the point. 

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model comes 23 years after the hit show first graced our TV screens, and 7 years after its eventual end in 2018. The three-part docuseries brings back some of the show’s favourite contestants—Danielle Evans, Joanie Dodds, and Keenyah Hill—along with creators Tyra Banks and Ken Mok and judges Jay Manuel, J. Alexander (aka Miss J) and (the still super hunky) Nigel Barker to pull back the curtain on the rise of the ground-breaking TV series. But while the docuseries attempts to explain away and take accountability for actions viewed badly “in hindsight,” Banks and co’s inability to actually engage with its legacy outside of this lens falls short—and isn’t nearly good enough.

For any teen of the late 1990s/early 2000s, ANTM was a pioneer in reality TV. The series, launched by Banks, set out to push back against modeling industry standards that dictated white, typically blonde, and rail thin (grossly known as “heroin chic”) as the most desirable and therefore employable. And Banks, as an underdog in the industry who’d come up through this era and earned her place, knew it— and was actively trying to fight against it.

And the show did succeed in many ways. Spanning 24 seasons and 15 years, ANTM helped not only bring the BTS world of modelling into the mainstream, but opened the door to thousands of young women who never saw themselves represented on the catwalks and in the magazine pages of their youth. Ahead of other series’, ANTM featured LGBTQ+ cast members and their stories, as well as dove into real world issues the models were dealing with around family, identity, and socioeconomic class. And ultimately it did give us  a number of modelling industry firsts; including one of the industry’s first plus-size models, Whitney Thompson, supermodel (and Canadian icon!) Winnie Harlow, and Isis King, the first-ever transgender model to compete on the show all the way back in 2008. Banks and ANTM *were* paving the way. 

But, over its 24-season run, the show  also confronted viewers—and its contestants—with some seriously questionable experiences all in the name of “fashion.” From makeovers that included unnecessary dental work (Dani’s tooth gap was gorgeous!), to photo shoot themes that ranged from having models pose as if they were murder victims to “swapping” ethnicities (which essentially had some models in blackface). Through a 2026 lens….they didn’t look good. Which is what Reality Check seems to be aiming to address—a look at just how the show came to be, and the story behind the out-of-touch monster of sorts that it inevitably became.

And for the most part, Reality Check’s participants face the show’s legacy, and their experience on it, relatively head on. What becomes clear from early on in the docuseries  is that everyone—from the judges to the contestants to Tyra herself—were incredibly inexperienced. This was beforeThe Bachelor franchise; before anyone had an inkling of what being on a reality TV show entailed and the ways producers might push a situation or edit a storyline to generate the most buzz. They, like so many of us back in the early 2000s, were naïve;  putting their faith in an industry and a TV medium that is and continues to be predicated on one thing: The bottom line. 

Inevitably, that bottom line impacted the series. As early as Cycle 2, the language shifted from excitement around differences to an emphasis on employability. Those outdated industry beauty standards, specifically around weight and body size, started to seep back in via judges Banks, Manuel, Alexander, Barker and frequent guest judge Janice Dickinson (the latter of whom said one contestant needed to lose 150 pounds), and the number of problematic shoots increased as ANTM pushed for higher ratings. Looking back at this time in the series, there’s one sentiment that Banks and her team, repeatedly turn to: In hindsight, looking back through a 2026 lens, they would handle things differently— the body shaming, the inability to protect contestants from harassment, the harmful makeovers—but at the time in the 2000s, they didn’t know they were harmful. Talking about the decisions she made during her time on the show, Banks said: “Hindsight is 20/20 for all of us. It just so happens that a lot of the things that are 20/20 for me happened in front of the world.” 

Which is true, but also starts to feel—quite quickly—like an excuse. 

While it’s understandable that looking back the ANTM team would have regrets; who among us hasn’t done something, said something, or made questionable decisions that we look back on, with more time, insight, and intelligence, and slightly cringe? It’s exactly this sentiment that feels like the documentary— and Banks and her co-creator’s—downfall. Because the lens of hindsight is the only lens through which Banks and her judges seem able—and ultimately willing to—interrogate the show and their role in it. Even when, for Banks, her behaviour or actions stand outside the test of time. 

In the few instances when documentarians confront Banks with situations that she could actually engage with and take accountability for contemporarily—she outright refuses to.Take, for example, the breakdown of her relationship with former BFF and creative director Jay Manuel, who—after being unceremoniously fired in 2012 alongside Alexander and Barker—felt betrayed by Banks and the role she played in what he feels was his mistreatment by the show. After almost a decade of silence between the two, instead of addressing this head-on, Banks tells the camera and the audience that she “should call Jay” off-camera. (Banks herself was replaced as host in 2016). 

But arguably the most egregious example of this comes during the discussion about the experience of Cycle 2 contestant Shandi Sullivan. A fan-fave, Sullivan’s time on the show was cut short after a trip to Milan found that season’s contestants spending time after-hours with a group of men. What started as an innocent dinner at their shared apartment ended with Shandi, blacked out and seemingly cheating on her boyfriend. Footage of Sullivan in bed having sex was aired, along with the emotional fallout from the incident and Sullivan’s heartbreaking phone call to her boyfriend. It was a moment that stands out in ANTM history, and led to Sullivam facing public backlash and leaving the show. In reality, as Sullivan shares in the docuseries, what producers were actually filming—and failing to step in to help her on— was a sexual assault.  “I remember him on top of me. I was blacked out,” Sullivan emotionally recalls. “No one did anything to stop it. And it all got filmed, all of it.” 

Additionally, Sullivan shares, the show filmed her having to see a doctor and call her assailant to ask if he had STIs or had used protection—all under the assumption that this was a hook-up gone bad. In the Cycle 2 episode that aired back in March 2004—titled “The Girl Who Cheated”—Banks is even shown having a seemingly “coincidental” conversation with the contestants, including Sullivan, about cheating, just days after her assault, forcing her to publicly share the experience once again on-camera. 

In response to questions about whether or not the crew and production went too far in their treatment of Sullivan, Banks says it’s difficult for her to talk about production decisions because that wasn’t her role, noting: “It’s important for people to know that we didn’t put everything on TV.” Executive Producer Ken Mok said of his decisions around that episode: “we scaled back that scene in a significant way.” 

Which doesn’t really feel like it cuts it. Because, while we can claim hindsight in 2026 on many things, failing to intervene during a sexual assault in the name of good TV, isn’t one of them.   

Especially when many of the experiences contestants faced in the name of better ratings and storytimes, like Sullivan’s sexual assault, were explicitly harmful and have had long-lasting effects. Twenty years later, it’s still difficult for Sullivan to process the events that happened on ANTM, as she tells the audience, “I hated myself” after her time on Cycle 2. And the other featured contestants similarly have struggled with their identity and worth after their experience on and treatment by the show.   

And in a way, the show’s inability to engage with—and take accountability—for these serious and harmful experiences and repercussions kind of throw the whole apology/atonement angle of the documentary into question. It’s relatively easy to apologize for actions with the passage of time, no one can really argue with that. But the documentary’s inability to seriously grapple with some of these larger actions makes their constant reliance on “hindsight” to explain away the others feel kind of like an insincere cop out. And begs the questions: What is the point of a documentary like Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model? And why do we need it now?

Is it a way for contestants to have their voices heard? Maybe. Yet another millennial nostalgia play that Netflix can bank on? Definitely. Or is it a thinly-veiled apology vehicle for Banks’ inevitable comeback to TV? With the model teasing a potential Cycle 25 return ahead of the docuserie’s premiere—most likely. The truth? Its point and the validity of its apology is for viewers to decide. But one thing is certain—in the legacy of America’s Next Top Model, no one really ends up coming out on top. 

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

Feature image: photo by Chris Polk/FilmMagic via Getty Images