Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model doesn’t begin in 2003, when America’s Next Top Model premiered and took television by storm. It doesn’t begin in the 1990s, when eventual host Tyra Banks rose to superstardom in the modeling industry. Instead, it begins in 2020, when the pandemic led a new generation to binge early-aughts reality TV, this time watching with a modern lens—and, naturally, tearing it to shreds on TikTok.
From there, Netflix’s newest docuseries rewinds to tell the full story of America’s Next Top Model, from its pre-production through its 24 scandalous cycles and into its modern-day legacy, featuring interviews with contestants, producers, and judges, including Banks herself. Reality Check leans into the same trend that inspired its creation: reexamining years-old media, like a cult classic reality TV show, with a critical eye.
What viewers casually did on TikTok in 2020, Reality Check does with finesse. It dissects the surface-level controversies fans already know about, from body shaming to the show’s infamous race-swapping photoshoot (and its oft-forgotten sequel four years later).
It also brings new revelations that cast the series in an even darker light, like Cycle 2 contestant Shandi Sullivan alleging that she was sexually assaulted on camera, with production doing nothing to step in or help her. Instead, the docuseries details Top Model portraying the incident as Sullivan cheating on her boyfriend, even filming her tearful call home to break the news to him. Through it all, Banks dodges accountability, even teasing that the show could come back for a 25th cycle.
Reality Check is the latest entry in a trend of exposé documentaries around TV that many young adults watched in their childhoods, cashing in on nostalgia by peddling its opposite. In 2024, Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV dove into the controversies surrounding Nickelodeon series, particularly those created under Dan Schneider’s tenure as a producer and showrunner. (That series built on the fervor generated by Jennette McCurdy’s best-selling 2022 memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, which included stories from her time starring in iCarly and Sam & Cat.)
Also in 2024, VICE released Dark Side of Reality TV, a 10-part docuseries with each episode focusing on the behind-the-scenes truth of a different reality TV show, including Toddlers & Tiaras, Hell’s Kitchen, Survivor, and—yes—America’s Next Top Model.
Even as the aesthetics of 2000s pop culture are celebrated and embraced, their actual pop culture artifacts are subject to renewed criticism. Everyone loves to binge-watch. Everyone loves to hate-watch. Documentaries like Reality Check provide the perfect crossover.