Netflix released their documentary about America’s Next Top Model back in February and I had some thoughts about it. Basically, I thought it was kind of unfair to look back on a show 20 years later and leave out all of the context of that time period with regard to where we were in reality television and fashion.
Now E! has released theirs as part of Dirty Rotten Scandals and let me just say….if Netflix wanted to do a hit piece on Tyra Banks, E! basically looked at that and said hold my beer!!! Because baybeeeeeee….throw that lady UNDER the jail. Here are my top ten takeaways.
10. Tyra was in the editing bay.
I love how they show this very staged picture anytime they talk about Tyra as a TV producer.
Not a super deep takeaway, but the Netflix documentary gave two conflicting positions on how close Tyra was to the storyline editing process. E! makes it unequivocally clear: Tyra Banks was in the editing room. The cut to Nigel Barker in an old interview responding to claims that Tyra was a control freak definitely put the nail in that coffin.
So! For those times on Netflix where Tyra was hemming and hawing about not having involvement in story? Bullshit, and I’m specifically referencing Shandi. She knew exactly what was going on, how it would be portrayed, and how Tyra herself, as on-air talent, could force Shandi to talk about it on camera during her little fake sit down with the girls in Milan to “spontaneously” talk about a model cheating on her.
9. Rae Sanni is a star.
I had never heard of Rae Sanni before this two-episode special, but all of the most biting criticism and nuanced commentary came from her. Anytime she was on my screen, I agreed whole-heartedly with what she said.
At one point, she broke down how Tyra Banks is a deeply insecure person who also has a huge ego. She’s very famous, in that we all know who Tyra Banks is, but she has always wanted the kind of legacy or iconic status that Noami Campbell has. She’s right, and I never put it all together before.
I remember watching Tyra’s sit down with Naomi on her (terrible) talk show and I thought it was funny how obviously dismissive Naomi was, without being outright mean, but Naomi had that persona in the press of being a bitch. This was the tail end of her going to court all the time for throwing phones at people and then doing her community service in couture gowns. Now, looking back, Naomi wasn’t a bitch and she most likely wasn’t a bitch to Tyra Banks either. Naomi was probably just dismissive, the way she was on that stage, because Tyra was so insignificant to her, whether it was as a baby model or a television mogul. Tyra could never be Naomi, which amused Naomi and infuriated Tyra.
8. The Jays don’t get off scot free this time.
I’m thinking maybe Mr. & Miss Jay had some kind of creative input into the Netflix documentary because the editing so heavily favored their versions of events and shied away from exposing how mean they actually were on the show. E! does not. They dug back in the vault and when they showed Miss Jay reminding Toccara to suck her stomach in because “it looks nasty,” I re-remembered how vicious they were right alongside Tyra and Janice. In one clip, you see the two of them being interviewed by some entertainment show and almost bragging that if the girls could make it through being bullied by them, they could make it in the fashion industry. E! was not here to coddle anyone’s image at all.
7. Janice Dicksinson is still nasty and takes no accountability.
I’m not sure why E! opted to have Janice on this show but neither of the Jays or Nigel. I doubt there was an exclusivity clause, because you do see Keenyah and Ebony in both specials, but Janice seemed to be there in an effort to put it all on Tyra. We have eyes and ears though, Janice. We can see otherwise, and we can see it on our screen with the clips E! pulled up.
Whereas Netflix tried to soften the edges of Janice’s Dickishness just a bit by explaining her as a foil for Tyra, E! does no such thing. Janice calls Tyra Banks everything but a child of God, while E! intercuts clips of Janice being all of the things she’s trying to put on Tyra. I’m not sure if Janice was trying to convince us that she was only being mean because Tyra needed someone to be Simon Cowell on the panel, but it didn’t work. Janice was mean because Janice is a mean person, and she still comes off as incredibly mean today.
6. The $100,000 contract was just an opportunity to work.
Sarah from Cycle 9 explained that the $100,000 CoverGirl contract was not money. In the contract, ANTM is telling the girls that the winner will have the opportunity to do $100,000 of work over the next year. Whether they book that work or not is irrelevant to the contract, so the winner could actually receive nothing. This surprised me for two reasons:
- Holy shit, what false advertising! If you tell me I’m going to win money at the end of a competition, it seems that the competition itself was the work — not that i have to do even more work to make the money. I could have made the money on my own by simply working.
- I’m not sure this was the case for the entirety of the series. I recently watched Cycle 18 winner Sophie Sumner explaining what she did with her money and she laid out that a third went to taxes and that she wishes she had invested the rest or maybe put a down payment on a property, but she basically used that money to fund her move to NYC. At some point, it must have been a cash prize or she wouldn’t have had this experience
5. Paper bag torture.
They really had those girls from All Stars riding around in a van with paper bags on their heads like they were going to Guantanamo Bay. Five hours with a paper bag on your head is not a modelling competition. It’s psychological warfare designed to disorient you, soften your psyche, and make you susceptible to participating in activities that you would normally say no to. Angelea and Lisa both said so, and they would not simply corroborate stories for a talking point because they don’t even like each other.
4. Yoanna went into tens of thousands of dollars of debt just to meet her Top Model commitments.
Let’s post The Picture real quick to remind ourselves of the best beauty shot to win the competition.
Iconic.
Also, what do you call this blue/green eye color? They really popped in the documentary and it’s so rare. The only other person I’ve seen where they jump off the screen like that is Aubrey O’Day, and hers are the same up close and in person.
I’d never heard anything bad from Yoanna and assumed she was one of the “happy” winners, but no. She was just quiet. At one point we hear Yoanna talk about going to sign her modelling contract with her mother after winning and then her mother asking, “Well…where is she going to stay?” They had no place for her to stay. Yoanna couch surfed and went into debt for hair, makeup, and clothes in order to go to appearances that Top Model had booked her for during the year of her “reign.” She was basically on-call to Tyra with nothing to show for it. She was expected to show up with no pay and do a “job” she didn’t know she signed on to do.
Also! Yoanna didn’t even need the show! Two weeks before, she had been offered a contract with Ford Models and went on the show because she thought it would teach her more about how to be a model!
3. Only one cycle was sponsored by a hair company.
Thinking back, CoverGirl is the sponsor I remember from the majority of the cycles. The girls were competing for a $100,000 CoverGirl contract and one of the final challenges was doing your ad campaign to see who could pull of being the most Girl Next Doorish. I think later cycles may have had other makeup companies, but the documentary confirmed that of all 24 cycles, 23 of them were sponsored by make-up companies.
On one cycle, the sponsor was Pantene, the very famous haircare line. And this is the season where Tyra Banks decided to not only cast a bald woman with alopecia but to also trick her into being bald for the entire competition. How in the fuck was a bald woman supposed to win a cycle where the sponsor was a haircare company?
Put Tyra in jail just for that alone.
The Netflix doc focused on a lot of early Top Model lore and I don’t think they had any participants later than cycle 8. Jeana is from Cycle 24, so many folks weren’t familiar with her. Listening to her explain (and cry) about how many tricks the editing pulled on her just broke my heart. From the moment she met Tyra Banks, they were playing games with Jeana about her Playboy history, her alopecia, and her modeling aspirations. They really did a number on that girl.
2. Top Model already knew Angelea was an escort.
When Angela was disqualified, I was a big Twitterer and I remember she was a trending topic. We didn’t know why she had been disqualified but collectively, most of us thought that A) she had actually won the competition and B) she was disqualified for getting pregnant. Absences of any actual information, that’s what we ran with. I think a couple of years passed by before the unconfirmed rumor of her sex work started to catch on.
Angelea tells the story herself and it’s even more heartbreaking because ANTM already knew she had been escorting after her first season. Angelea auditioned for Cycle 12 and didn’t get on. When she made it to the main cast in Cycle 14, she was edited to be a hoodrat. She made it really far in the competition, and hoped to book jobs, but due to how she came across on reality television, brands didn’t want to work with her. She had fame and she had beauty, but she had no money, so an opportunistic snake convinced her to use her fame and beauty to make money a different way.
Then, ANTM reached out about All Stars and Angela thought it was her big second chance to revise her image and make herself marketable to brands. During the casting interview, Michelle Mock outright told her that they knew she was escorting and being pimped. Michelle then told her to take this new opportunity and run with it, so she did. She ran so far that she crossed the finish line as the winner.
A few weeks later, they flew her from Buffalo to NYC to tell her that they couldn’t actually air her winning, gave her $300, and sent her on her way. Then they called Lisa and Allison to re-shoot the finale and they left Angelea’s disqualification vague in order to drum up more ratings and interest.
To her credit, Angela is now an award-winning journalist (she told us in the doc to put some respect on her name, so I am!), but she should have never had to go through any of that and I was so disgusted by everyone in production for doing that to her.
1. Tyra re-traumatized Lisa D’Amato on purpose.
My most upsetting takeaway from the first one was how Tyra treated Shandi on her talkshow.
Shandi never saw the episode. She couldn’t watch it because it was too traumatizing for her. So, when Tyra asked some of the girls to appear on her talk show, Shandi told Tyra that she had never seen it and doesn’t want to. Tyra then proceeded to play the clip for her and the audience to remind everyone what happened. Shandi looked down the entire time and instead of handling the situation with any sort of grace, Tyra asked Shandi why she had her head down, knowing full well that it’s because she asked y’all not to play that and you did it anyway.
(cont.)
Tyra did the same thing to Lisa.
Unfortunately, for whatever various reasons, Lisa is still not a very sympathetic character. Her personality is polarizing and her demeanor is a little abrasive. She’s a great example of how you have to be the perfect victim in order to receive public support and I kept catching myself dismissing her words simply because of how she presents them. If you go back and watch the doc, be better than me and try to put any judgement to the side and focus on what she’s saying instead.
In casting, Lisa explained how she had been mentally, physically, and sexually abused most of her childhood and her mother was her biggest abuser. Then, the show kept putting her in situations to be triggered. When she was called an alcoholic on her season, Lisa was stuck with that label after the show and it was hard for her to find work. So, like Angelea, she went back to All Stars to redeem her image.
Lisa made it to the top three, and she wasn’t as chaotic, but then she was picked as the winner after Angelea’s disqualification and the Internet tore her apart.
Finally, the folks on Tyra’s talk show offered her $375 to come on and talk about Top Model and her childhood trauma. She said she’d talk about the show, but nothing about her childhood, and they agreed. Of course, when she got there, producers wanted to talk about the trauma, so she refused, and they agreed. So why did she sit down on stage and the first thing Tyra brings up is her trauma? Just like Shandi, she was lied to for Tyra’s own ambition, but unlike Shandi, Lisa ran off stage and caused a fit.
So they locked her in a closet for half an hour and told her if she didn’t come out, and do the show how they wanted, that she wouldn’t get the $375.
Tyra Banks is definitely not a nice lady.
ANTM Final Thoughts
I stand by most of my previous assertions and I still think a lot of the present-day reactions to America’s Next Top Model are overblown virtue signaling from people who pretend they would have been Above It All during the show’s heyday. I, as an adult in 2026, would not watch the antics of ANTM today. But I, as an adult in 2002, did watch, because I did not have the social context, maturity, first-person model testimony, or hindsight to understand how bad it was at that time.
From the two Top Model documentaries, I have one overarching sentiment.
ANTM is not the show Tyra sought out to make, but it’s the one she agreed to keep doing — and make worse — as her ego and pocketbook grew.
I still believe Tyra’s idea for the show was to try to change the industry, and when she realized she could not do that from within the confines of fashion, and that her show was actually a huge hurdle for aspiring models, she should have ended it. Instead, she decided to keep dangling an unattainable future in front of really vulnerable young girls for the viewing entertainment of a public who had not yet realized how damaging the production machine was behind the curtain or how lasting the negative effects would be on the participants.
And there is absolutely no reason for her, or anybody else, to revive it again. There is no space in the current market for a show like America’s Next Top Model to exist in the way we’ve already experienced it. We know too much now and we’re not watching that.
PS: I have since watched the Dr. Phill segments on Dirty Rotten Scandals and I can confirm they also slap. Very much looking forward to the ones about The Price is Right.
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