America’s Next Top Model docuseries shows the high personal cost of reality TV | Canada Voices

Watching Netflix’s Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model in 2026 is downright uncomfortable. The three-part docuseries recalls an era when reality television was casually cruel, insulting and obsessed with controlling women’s bodies, right down to the inch, pound and tooth gap. It’s an unflinching look at a time on television when young women were taught their entire value was directly tied to their looks.

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But what’s most unsettling about the new doc isn’t just what happened onscreen, it’s how normal it all seemed at the time.

America’s Next Top Model premiered in 2003 and sold itself as the show that would change the modelling industry. Host Tyra Banks wanted to open doors for women who might never have access to the fashion world otherwise. But what Reality Check makes clear is that the show didn’t dismantle those power structures, it succumbed to them and repackaged them as entertainment. Trauma became entertainment.

Former contestants, including Shandi Sullivan, Dani Evans, Tiffany Richardson and Joanie Dodds, share harrowing experiences that shaped the rest of their lives. There were invasive forced surgeries, manipulated photo shoots and even an alleged sexual assault that was filmed without being stopped. Why? Because executive producer Ken Mok viewed this as a documentary and camera crews stopping the action would have been considered interference.

That acceptance didn’t happen in isolation. ANTM aired during a period when reality television included series such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan and The Biggest Loser. Contestants’ bodies and were treated as problems to solve, not something to be celebrated.

What makes Reality Check especially effective is how it exposes the truths behind those decisions. Former judges and collaborators Jay Manuel, J. Alexander and Nigel Barker outline a shift in priorities as the show aged, along with their own questionable experiences with production and Banks.

To this day the host remains the show’s most polarizing figure thanks to her enabling, which was disguised as mentorship. Her decision to participate in the docuseries is surprising, and her answers come across as completely controlled. She never appears in conversation with her former co-workers, despite how strongly she sold their friendships for the cameras once upon a time. It’s not a good look for her, particularly when she shrugs off important questions or pretends not to remember certain instances, and she may be questioning her publicity team for allowing her to participate right about now.

For her part, Banks insists her intention was to create opportunity. It is true that the show provided visibility to women who might never have entered the modelling industry otherwise. But Reality Check proves that visibility came at a cost, and Banks wasn’t just a host. She was an executive producer and a central architect of the show’s culture, which pushed instability and chaos as entertainment.

Banks acknowledges certain missteps, but she stops short of a full reckoning, unlike her co-stars. There’s a sense that she’s still managing her image rather than taking responsibility for her role in some of the things that happened. To be clear, other former contestants who did not participate in the docuseries have gone online since the show’s debut to reveal that Reality Check only grazes the surface of the horrors that actually went down.

It would be easy to view ANTM as a time capsule of the early 2000s, when the media landscape was built on bikini body tabloids and diet culture. But the docuseries arrives at a moment when extreme thinness is resurging, fuelled in part by appetite-suppressing GLP-1 drugs and the normalization of cosmetic intervention. And that makes it more relevant than ever.

Sure, there’s new language. Thinness is framed as wellness and discipline is self-care. But women’s bodies are still treated as public property, open to commentary and correction. Ask Ariana Grande, Melanie Lynskey, Selena Gomez or any other female celebrities who have been criticized on the red carpet in recent years.

It’s a sobering reminder of how easily entertainment can shape norms and how quickly audiences accept harmful standards when they’re packaged as aspiration. This time, the women who once stood silently in front of ANTM’s judging panel aren’t waiting for approval, though. They’re telling their own stories, on their own terms, reframing the show under a new narrative. And they’re forcing viewers to confront their roles along the way.

Because the most uncomfortable truth Reality Check reveals isn’t what the show did to its contestants. It’s how willingly we watched.