Pop Culture Happy Hour - America’s Next Top Model

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

America’s Next Top Model has been rewatched in the years since its 2003 premiere, and its handling of race, body image, and other issues has been loudly and heavily criticized. A new Netflix docuseries Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model interviews the major players including Tyra Banks, J. Alexander, Jay Manuel and Nigel Barker. And it doesn’t let Tyra off easy. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus at plus.npr.org/happyhour See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

For 24 seasons, America's next top model asked the question, you want to be on top? And host and creator, Tyra Banks, told the aspiring model contestants that she could make it happen. Years later, as the show is rewatched over and over on streaming, top metal's handling of race, body image, and other issues has been loudly and heavily criticized. And a new Netflix docu-series talks to a lot of the major players, Tyra included, and it doesn't let Tyra off easy. I'm Aisha Harris. I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're looking back at America's Next Top Model on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining us today is Culture Writer and critic Shamira Shemira. Hey, Linda, happy to be back. Absolutely happy to have you. Also with us is Sidney Madden. She's a music and culture critic. Welcome back, Sydney. Hi, Linda. Hi, hi, Isha. I'm excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we're all excited. So America's Next Top Model premiered in the spring of 2003. It was the brainchild of supermodel Tyra Banks with executive producers Ken Mock and Kenya Barris. Most seasons were hosted by Banks herself until it ended in 2018. The format was simple. A group of contestants, all young women until a couple of late cycles that also featured Ben, would live in a house together, be taught about modeling, and participate in photo shoots.

Each week, based on those photo shoots, somebody was eliminated. The Netflix docu-series reality check inside America's next time. model, which is streaming now, is part of the ongoing re-evaluation of the show we've seen in recent years. E will also have its own special in a few weeks. The Netflix docu-series features interviews with Banks, a collection of contestants, and the trio of creative director Jay Manuel, runway coach Ms. Jay Alexander, and photographer Nigel Barker, all of whom were major on-screen presences on the show, and all of whom were fired in 2012 when the ratings went down, although Miss Jay did return for a few later seasons. All three of those, by the way, served as consultants on the documentary. I'm going to start with you, Aisha. You have a piece about this that people can read at npr.org. You and I come to Top Model with slightly different. I was a little older when I was watching it than you were, but I know we both watched a lot of it. Where do you come down on sort of the legacy of Top Model as seen through the lens of this docuseries?

Yeah, I was, you know, a teenager when this show came out. So I would also say I was quite impressionable at that time. And I had not revisited the show since I stopped watching somewhere around cycle nine or ten. I watched a lot of cycles. Also, the fact that they call them cycles, it's just so. Yeah. Just call them seasons. It's supposed to be chic, you know? Yes. It's the couture way of saying season. No, I think what's interesting about this docu series is the fact that, as I note in my piece, like, Tyro Banks is a way. It's a good tour way of saying season. No, I think what's interesting about this docu series is the fact that, as I note in my piece, like, Tyra Banks isn't credited as an executive producer or a producer on this. And so I'm kind of interested in the way that this show is attempting to provide a platform for her to take something like accountability. And I guess we can on decide accountability feels like the type of word that we throw around a lot. But like no one has the same definition of accountability or like what they expect from that. And so I think a lot of people are going to get different reactions to this docu-series.

But for me, where the accountability came through is not in what Tyra said, but in the fact that we got to hear so many people kind of rebut her apologies or her abdication of responsibility. And hearing these voices in one forum, I think, is very powerful, even if there are limitations to what a docu-series like this could ever achieve, no matter how much is said here. So, yeah, there's a lot going on. And your mileage will vary with this, I think. Yeah, I think that's true. Sid, how about you? What do you think? Well, jumping off Ayesha, accountability is the million-dollar question going into this. The fact that there's been so much hindsight outrage with the pandemic-era rewatch of the show and everything, the documentary definitely heavily relies on the social media outrage as almost a proxy for accountability. So the big get in this documentary is the fact that you get Tyra in the hot seat. You get the Js and you get Nigel, you get Ken Mocky,

You get the former executive from UPN who greenlit the show. But I will say for me, it is a moving target accountability. And from my point of view, the accountability was not really taken on the show for a few key reasons. She talks about how originally the show was meant to be a mashup of the real world and American Idol, but set in the modeling industry. But then she contradicts herself by comparing it to other reality shows that were big at the time. Fear factor. Yeah.

Fear Factor, Survivor, and she said all of these things were so big, and the viewers wanted more and more and more. You guys were demanding it. The viewers wanted more and more and more. That was the record scratch for me because I was a viewer back then. This show started when I was 12 years old. Again, I was also highly impressionable. And some things, some of the challenges in the first, I'll say three cycles, were very realistic. The challenge is getting more and more absurd and honestly more gross.

That's why that idea that the audience wanted it felt like a cop out because to me I was 12, 13, 14, 15. I wanted to know what it meant to go on a go see. I wanted to know what it meant to think of yourself as a blank canvas and learn how to walk as a model. I wasn't interested in watching people, you know, have to consume raw meat or put raw meat on their body. That was just the shock value. It didn't feel like the shock value started to trump the on-the-job training that the show originally promised. And that was kind of the most frustrating part to me. The way they put it, they set out to change the modeling industry.

And as the documentary shows, it kind of became more about storytelling and the limits that could be pushed rather than training someone to really be a model in this world. And over the years or, sorry, over the cycles, when things got more and more absurd, they do end up perpetuating a lot of the same dangers that Tyra herself was victim to. like the body shaming. But you see time and time again that all of these dangers are reinforced, even by Tyra herself and the judges who are in the hot seat. And to me, accountability would have been more of a face-to-face sit-down with all of the former contestants who do show up in this show. Because I think that's where the documentary shines the most. When they talk to the contestants

and, you know, they can answer back and forth, but if it was actually a face-to-face sit-down, because they got everybody in the room just all at separate times. If it was something more of a communal conversation, that would have been a bigger hit for accountability to me. Yeah, I think that's probably true. And because you mentioned one of the pieces of background on that is that there's a woman named Kenya who was a contestant on cycle four, a big part of her narrative centered on her weight. She was criticized for her weight. She portrayed gluttony when they did seven deadly sins. She was an elephant in the animal photo shoot.

But then also during a photo shoot with some male models, which was something they did over and over again, that often had really strange or awkward or bad results, I feel like. In her version of it, she stopped production because she was very uncomfortable with the way one of the men, they were sort of dancing and he was touching her. And during the judging panel, Tyra and the other judges gave her advice about how to handle. handle it. I feel personally that their advice came down to sort of you need to handle it. In the documentary, Tyra says that she's sorry, says I did the best I could at the time. So just for background, that's sort of what we're talking about. And in those two things that's part of it, particularly the body shaming. There's a lot of other stuff too. Sorry, Shamira, I do want to get directly to you. Tell me where you came down on this whole thing. I think, you know,

for me, what kind of comes out is not just accountability, but like the concept of storytelling, right? I think a big part of this documentary was the stories that we tell ourselves and how we square that with the narratives that other people have of us, right? So, like, the story of America's not-to-top model is, like, a phenomenon around what was supposed to be an inside look-at to all the trials and tribulations it takes to become a successful model. But then it ends up becoming a saga of how can we make a good reality television show? How can we sell a good narrative?

And they say that at different points. Like, they point out that to keep, you know, certain cast members on for longer, they'd have to pick good shots or bad shots of others to justify preserving the story because now it was about selling a narrative and putting people in archetypes. Similarly, the documentary itself is about confronting each of the participant's stories around themselves and what they've told themselves and whether or not that squares with some version of objective truth. So a lot of what you see with Tyra is a lot of the abdication of like, well, I did the best I could with what I had at the time. I was trying to show tough love. I was trying to meet, you know, producers' needs. It was above me, right?

But does that square of the story she tells us of, this is my chance to be a boss. This is my chance to do something on my own terms. This is my chance to be able to have authority and change the industry. Not really, right? Similarly, even with the Js who are probably, I would say, arguably, a little bit more upfront around some of the failings of the show at different points. They would go from saying, I'm a creative director to, oh, I had, you know, no ability that was up to production. Yeah. So was there really no possibility for you to have a voice?

And even just the fact that all those things are happy and simultaneously, I think what really came out to me is that, yes, this is, of course, a story about exploitation, a story about the dangerous reality television and how things can become, you know, the animal that you claim to want to avoid. But also, I think in part it's about the things we tell ourselves about our complicity in harmful systems, right? I don't think anybody could reasonably expect that Tyra and Jay Manuel and Miss Jay would unilaterally take down, you know, fat phobia, colorism. in the industry, right? But absent being able to unilaterally take that down, does that mean that your complicity is acceptable? And I think that was the big question. Yeah. It's interesting because I think you're all exactly right that accountability through this documentary was not really in reach for them as much because Tyro was never going to take it because they weren't trying to kind of explain the things that she did. And I think for me, one of the things that was the most interesting

about the docu-series is that Tyra Banks, she doesn't always understand how she comes across. And there's a moment late in this series where she kind of gives one of, I mean, I think of it as like a classic Tyra speech about growth and, you know, I hope that everybody has a chance to grow from this like I did. It even sounded like a judging panel, the way she spoke. 100%. And she sort of does this whole, you're absolutely right. It's kind of a classic judging panel, Tyra. You know, I want to talk about growth as a person. And then it's sort of punctured immediately with a comment from one of the contestants.

I want you guys to be just as open as I am now about getting called on my shit. But when somebody called you out on yours. Because that day will come and continue to evolve. Because that's what we're all doing. Gordat is absolutely ridiculous. And she doesn't understand the reason you were able to control the narrative in that situation is that it was your show. It is not how good you are at explaining yourself and it's not how wise the things you say are. If you took the same thing she said on the show and you punctuated them with a person making a WTF face, it would look completely different.

It's because she controlled the show that she was able to. sort of come away with this idea that she seems like a nice person. Another instance where I don't think she comes off to self-aware is when she's talking about the quote-unquote race swapping photo shoots that they did a few times, which essentially put models in black and brown face. The fact that it was plural was just... Plural. Yes.

egregious. Yeah. Tyra says that looking at the show now through a 2020 lens, she sees why it's an issue. And that's the thing. It's like a revisionist lens on it. No, I remember watching it as it happened. And similar to Zika Gibbons, who's one of the experts, one of the few experts we do get to hear from in this doc. She might be the only one, I think. Yeah. I'm against that. But I remember the show back in the day going on commercial break. And it was me and my sister watching it was like, was that blackface? So it's not that everyone was upset with it now. It's just we didn't have camera phones and our own mics. Everybody didn't have a voice to. shared their disdain or their confusion or their disgust about it because exactly to your point, Linda, all the chips were in Tyres hand. Like she was becoming more and more powerful with every season.

And she even says in the dock, oh, I thought this was my way of showing the world that black is beautiful. And then they cut to a judging panel where they put the white girl in blackface. She was like, I was loving it. Okay, girl, I'm sure you were, sister. You know, it was just completely devoid of any sense of reality because she was getting so powerful. But I do want to go back to the point we just made before about Zakiya Gibbons being the only outside voice who's considered an expert on this show. One place where the stock falls flat for me is adding that context. They're acting as if the

social media outrage is the only proxy for how we're looking at this. When if we're talking about disordered eating, why not have someone from NEDA come on as an expert and talk about the psychology and the psychosis of that illness? Or, if we're talking about, if we're talking about disordered eating, why Or if we're talking about how social media outrage can be amplified of something that happened years and years ago, why not have a sociologist to speak to that, you know? And this is not a stroke of she's a stand-in for a lot of us who grew up with it and who was affected by the show. But I do think there was more expert context that could have been added to this. Yeah. Yeah.

And to that point, you know, if we're going to talk about assault, you know, you need someone on camera that can talk about it. Exactly. Because to be frank, you know, we have Shannie give a very heroin story around when she went through and really confront what is clearly traumatic to her over and over again, not just in the process of making the documentary, but also just throughout her career as a public figure. But what I think becomes ultimately striking is in confronting, you know, the other participants, the producers, Tyra, so on and so forth. No one says the word assaults. It's not used, not as a question or as a response. Yeah. Right. So she, Shandy, if you don't know this story, was a contestant in cycle two. They went on a trip during the season to Milan. The models met up with a bunch of guys. They started drinking. She says in the documentary that she blacked out after the amount of drinking that they did. Production filmed her having sex in the shower. And she says nobody put a stop to it despite the fact that she was blacked out. As Shemira pointed out, she does not say assault. The documentary does not say assault. It was framed as a story about cheating on her boyfriend and what it means for her to have cheated on her boyfriend.

Both Ken Mock and Tyra say they did not put everything that happened on camera on television. To me, the part that was so devastating about watching that was seeing her the next day just sobbing and sobbing. And the presentation of the show is she's sobbing because she cheated on her boyfriend and she's so upset with herself for doing that. And I'm sure that that may have been part of it, right? I'm sure her feelings may have been very confused as many people's feelings are after an experience like that. But she's not just sobbing because she cheated on her boyfriend. There's so much more going on when she looks so devastated and traumatized. Yeah.

I mean, I went back and rewatch that episode in full after watching this series. And it is just sort of diabolical the way they really hammer home that she cheated. And even just filming her telling her boyfriend. back home what happened and then him yelling at her and berating her over the phone. And look, I understand especially back then in the early 2000s when this was filmed and aired, like so many people did not have the language to call these things assault. I mean, people still have that issue. But I think generally speaking, there has been more in the culture now that like more people can label things in the way that they are. So I can understand why she wouldn't necessarily

have been maybe thinking that at the time. But what the series really showed to me was yes, there is a lack of context, there is a lack of more expert opinion. But I think if you watch it closely, there is still something you can get from it, which is not just the story of like how awful this show was in many ways, but also just the way that reality TV at that time was such the Wild Wild West. And like people were trying everything and anything to get people to tune in and watch. But I do think they do a good job intentionally or no of explaining just how like the gutter reality TV was back then and still can be. Yeah, right.

I think a couple of things stuck out to me about that specific storyline. I think one thing that stood out to me was the outright, not just implication, but outright statement that the main reason why anything was really edited around was not because of real propriety reasons out of any sort of moral concern as much as it was on the heels of Janet Jackson's halftime show and the fracas that had happened around that. And so they felt pressure to go into the editing bay to still give this salacious story, but try to meet these like rapidly accelerating, you know, FCC regulations. And so the vision of like going through that footage over and over again to try to make some

version of it that is still titillating enough for television, I remember as a teen watching it. And I do remember it was framed as like, oh my God, she's such a insert any slur you want here. You know, she cheated, did all these things. Yes. And now being someone who actually writes about people who have survived sexual assault and actually, you know, opines publicly about it in the industry, it is remarkably striking that like the implications of what we see on social media now when these things happen were happening very cutely to, you know, Shandy, in person because social media wasn't as big then. So to hear her talking about how she was being approached in public repeatedly, being sludshamed to her face with her partner next to her, you know. And this is one of the reasons their relationship collapsed. Exactly.

You know, that sort of impact, I feel like one of the frustrations I have of the docu-series is that if you're going to have these people in front who were involved, we should force them to be more explicit about the failure there. And I do think the documentary gave a little bit too much free reign as to what, you know, the Js, what Nigel, what Tyra were willing to talk about or not willing to talk about. And I think it ultimately allows for like a little bit of slipperiness, right? You know, where they can say, like, we feel bad about this, but this was really out of our hands. I don't want to make this sound like I'm cutting Tyra Grace because it's not true, but I do think that there are moments where it's quite obvious that in Tyra's head, she felt like she was helping, right? Whether that's the case is not true. For sure, right? You know, I equated to, like, if you've ever had to, like, be in a workplace with, like, someone of an elder generation and they're giving you, like, tough love tips, right?

And so they're telling you, you just have to kind of get with the program, but you're like, but the program is wrong. Why would I not want to change the program? Yeah. And you feel that generational tension, right, with Tyra, where I think in her had a lot of the lessons that she felt like she was imparting was about how to make it work. And what she still struggles to acknowledge or realize is that that is not what those women receive. But those women receive is how to make yourself smaller, right? Both metaphorically and literally. And I think a great example of what you're talking about, Shamira, is the Tiffany moment when she goes off at Tiffany.

But it created one of the most viral moments of the show when she berates Tiffany. after she's eliminated because Tiffany is not giving the type of devastation in her response that she maybe expected she would for the cameras. I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this. When my mother yells at this is because she loves me. I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you. I don't dare you.

But she does talk about it in the documentary. She's like, that is some deep black girl stuff. And I really wish the documentary would have gone in on that more. Because it's such a fleeting. moment that people have memed to death and they've made skits out of. But when you talk about Chmere, what you're saying, like, Tyra was moving in an industry that was very much against her. She made herself a success despite a lot of this stuff. And what she was imparting on the next generation was this is how to survive. This is how to maneuver, right? Maybe you could have taken a

step back and see, like, where was the harm done to me that I don't want to perpetuate? Because otherwise, like, you're just continuing the cycle through all these cycles, you know? That's a part of documentary. I really wish they would have gotten more in on. Right. Tyra was, you know, she's a young woman from the inner city. She's from Englewood. You know, she doesn't hide these parts of herself, right? I do think she tries to play it into like a more kooky persona.

But you can see that kind of sense of hyper-individualism that comes out when she scold someone like Tiffany of like, I had all these roadblocks in front of me and I sucked it up and I made away. How dare you not fight for the same thing? Does that make what she said acceptable? Absolutely not, right? It also defies logic about how systems work, but you do understand where it comes from. I think what really struck me as well is that most people said that the rant was actually way worse than what we saw and that it actually involved legal interference.

And I think their reluctance to even acknowledge what was said, absent an NDA also really put me off a little bit because if we're going to allude to the fact that it was more harmful than we even know. And Tiffany has gone on record in interviews since saying that that was something that really. decimated her at the time, right? I think it's worth it to at least allude to what was actually the themes that we were omitting. Right. It's notable that Janice Dickinson, who was another panelist, is not in the hot seat here at all. I don't know what she's doing these days, but like she gets a lot of heat from other people talking about her. And yes, she was awful. Like, it was bad. Yeah, she was kind of like the Simon Cowell of their general channel. Like she was a designated mean one. I would say it as harsh as possible. Yeah.

The mean one in a panel of mean, like, they're all kind of mean. Right. I think that's my ultimate question, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like, they framed Janice as so, you know, callous and cool, which she was, don't get me wrong, right? You know, like telling models they need to lose 150 pounds. All the things that she said were beyond the pale, right?

Yeah. But I think what really continued to strike me was, you know, is the idea that because she said it's so caustically make it inherently worse than you quietly and tacitly agreeing with her? Right. Because what happened is that they would be. banter and Tyler would say, that's wrong to say, that's cruel to say. And said, well, maybe she could lose a little weight, right? So it's like, you're actually not fundamentally disagreeing with her. You're disagreeing with the delivery. And I think if the issue is a delivery, then you're not

confronting the reality that the actual issue is the message that you're communicating to these women, right? Yeah. I will say, you know, as a plus-size lady myself, it is always worse when it comes from when you're not expecting it. So to me, to stand in front of a judging panel where you know you're looking at Janice Dickinson, she's going to say something rude to you would not be as bad for me personally as we're going to send you off to this photo shoot. It's going to be great. You're going to be so glamorous and beautiful.

And then you get there and they're like, we don't have any clothes that fit you. Oh, my God. That happens so much. Or you get there and they want to cover you up, right? Because it's so clear that they just think you're unacceptable, right? And those are all things that the show set up. That's not necessary. Like, I am no fan of Janice Dickinson.

But when I think about the most humiliating things that they did to the plus-size models on that show, it is not that. It is the other stuff. It's bringing someone in front of, you know, showing them a nice photo and then chastising them for how much it costs to retouch. Right. Or even Whitney, who was the first plus-size model to win the whole thing during such a 10 and then her contract with the modeling agents in, they didn't even have a plus size division. Yeah. There's a lot of questions right now because, again, we're talking about hindsight being 2020.

Aisha, you said reality TV back then was a wow-wow West. And it very much was. And it gave us so many chaotic moments because of that, because there were no rules. There were no guardrails. But even think about the world we're moving in now, where we're streaming is the new economy. The creator economy is just booming. That's still the wow, wow west. And a lot of these transgressions still go on.

Yeah. We're absolutely in a new era of body shaming and thin culture and thin is in and packing everything with protein and just incentivizing, taking weight loss, GLP ones in a new era. And if you look at even the modeling space, I think the creator economy has opened up a whole new lane for who could be potentially a model. I know a lot of working models who are not thick, skinny, but if we're talking about supermodels, top models, be on top, a lot of them are still very, very, very, thin. And so much of what was promoted back then is still very much the MO. I know there was a time when Victoria's Secret Fashion Show went off air and Savage X Fentive by Rihanna started to push a lot more representation and diversity. But I feel like that pendulum is swinging right back to where it was of the early 2000s. You know, like where we're moving right now is the Wow Well West,

except it's just in an online forum. Yeah, I think that's right. Well, we want to to know what you think about reality check inside America's next hot model, find us at Facebook.com slash PCHH. And that brings us to the end of our show. Shamira Abraham, Sydney Madden, Aisha Harris. Thank you so much for being here. I absolutely loved this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This episode is produced by Carly Rubin and Mike Katzif and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello. Come in provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes and we'll see you all next time. Thank you.