LINK: reality check: inside america’s next top model
I’ve never seen an episode of America’s Next Top model before.
But my assistant is obsessed with reality TV and begged me to watch the documentary (Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model) so that we could talk about it. I ended up binging the show on Netflix.
SPOILER BELOW
Tyra Banks is a piece of shit. I don’t say that lightly.
I know she was an icon in the early 2000s and this documentary was going to be her big comeback but it just made her look like a complete villain. Instead of giving back and empowering young women, she spent years preying on their deepest insecurities and humiliating them on national television all the while pretending to be their mentor and savior.
The part that was hard for me to watch was what happened to Shandi.
She got blackout drunk in the hot tub, slept with a guy who wasn’t her boyfriend (possible sexual assault or rape since it sounds like she didn’t give consent?) and the show just kept rolling their cameras instead of helping her. When she called her boyfriend to confess what happened, they insisted on filming that as well… along with her doctor’s appointment to get tested for STIs. She was completely devastated, ashamed, and broken… the show milked every second of it for drama.
I literally felt sick for her.
They even removed one girl’s teeth. Five of them because she had a snaggletooth. The show even wanted to widen a contestant’s tooth gap. Like what the fuck is going on here?
These young women on the show had real dreams, real traumas, and real vulnerabilities and the entire show was built on exploiting them for entertainment. Tyra weaponized their insecurities and made them into a spectacle.
This is another reason why I loathe “reality” television.
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