Ask any fan of the seminal supermodel competition show, America's Next Top Model (ANTM), for its most unforgettable moment, and they'll likely give you the same answer: the episode when host Tyra Banks screamed with rage at a contestant who she believed wasn't taking it seriously enough.
"I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you! How dare you! Learn something from this!" Banks yells at aspiring model Tiffany Richardson, who Banks had just evicted from the contest, in a clip that has long been a famous meme. As the most indelible moment from the series, which ran from 2003 for a remarkable 24 "cycles" (or seasons), it's the obvious place to begin for a new Netflix documentary series examining the show, especially as the clip really resurfaced again on social media during the pandemic in 2020. It led viewers to dig out other controversial scenes from the show's back catalogue, and unsurprisingly, reassessed through a 2020s lens, they had not aged well – Banks even wrote on Twitter at the time: "Been seeing the posts about the insensitivity of some past ANTM moments and I agree with you. Looking back, those were some really off choices."
Getty ImagesContinuing this retroactive exposé of the show, last year saw the release of a podcast, Curse of: America's Next Top Model, which is now followed by a three-part Netflix series Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model. Premiering next week, it catalogues a whole host of controversial events which occurred both on and off screen, at the expense of the young women who had signed up for a show that would supposedly transform their lives for the better. "There were cruel aspects of ANTM," says Danielle Lindemann, author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us. "But, for better or worse, it is part of the cultural zeitgeist."
