Chapter 1: What impact did America's Next Top Model have on viewers' perceptions of beauty?
I think it came out when I was 12. America's next top model. Every conscious thought I've had about my body and sexuality and being a girl and how to eat has been guided by this show. That was on until I was... 28?
You went from an impressionable age to, like, young adult to, like, fully an adult. And Tyra and the show were there every step of the way.
Yeah, Tyra was with me through puberty and my divorce. And you can't say that about a lot of people.
A new documentary tries to reckon with the show's toxic legacy. Do you think that Tyra Banks learned anything? Feels anything about all this?
Who cares? Like, she's... I don't know, maybe. Do I think the man on the moon considers his moral obligation to me?
Not really. The reality TV that made us, coming up on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Talkiatry. It's a 100% online psychiatry practice that provides evaluations, diagnoses and ongoing medication management for conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, so much more. Talkiatry says it takes just a few minutes to get started.
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I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen and the water was pitch black. I started swimming and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love, a show about the surprising things that love can make us do. More than 100 episodes available now on This Is Love.
America's next top model is... Today Explained!
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Chapter 2: How does the documentary address the toxic legacy of America's Next Top Model?
Well, I mean, look, culture moves in like 20 to 30 year cycles. And so there's always nostalgia that comes up with these things. That is a show that premiered right after 9-11. It speaks to a very particular slice of kind of early to mid-aughts reality show culture. We are in a phase where we're rethinking all of those things. And I mean, Netflix is doing it in particular. They did
Jerry Springer documentary a little while ago. They just did one on The Biggest Loser. I mean, it is an interesting time to reassess the culture that continues to dominate all of the things we watch. They are all guided by these reality shows from 2000 to, oh, 2010. What a rough decade, honestly. What a rough decade.
They should give us the Purple Heart for surviving it because, like, it's crazy that we're alive.
What was America's Next Top Model? Sure.
is about dreams, plain and simple. And it's about accomplishing these dreams through hard work, talent, and passion. I want to take someone from obscurity to fame. And I want to chart the entire process and show America how it happens.
It was a reality competition show. They would bring on a bunch of very young, old teenagers and young women. Some girls were still, you know, like 18, 19, and then 23, 24. They would get these girls, they put them in a house together, and they would have to do these modeling competitions every week.
We are going to give you girls... Three minutes to put together an outfit using your own clothes that best evokes one of these three walks that you are going to see on this screen right here to my left. So the shoot is, you girls are all gonna be crime scene victims. Tiffany, you're gonna be Native American. Brittany, an African American woman. Kenya, Korean.
And Noel, we're making you into a traditionally African woman with a head wrap and everything.
You know, the show created like a whole lexicon for us that we didn't have before. We know the word smize, which is the dumbest word. That's a verb. Meaning. Smiling with your eyes. But it was such a strange fever dream of a show. It is exactly like a lot of reality competitions still.
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Chapter 3: What were the significant moments from Shandi's story on the show?
But it was so specific and weird and saliently helmed by a lunatic. Like, Tyra was cuckoo bananas, and that's why we loved her. She was amazing TV. She was always trying to trick the girls.
There's one where she, like, pretends to faint in front of them.
Tyra!
And then she's like, I'm acting. And then they put it in the show.
Like, it's not just... that she was doing it. I guess that's what's so remarkable about the product and the documentary. She was just doing it.
Then they were like, right, let's put music over it. And then we're going to put a little code thing here that says Tyra Bix that we're going to put on TV and you're going to watch it. And boy, did I.
And boy, did we all. You use the word lunatic. I think it is fair. I think it is kind. I think it is appropriate.
I say that with affection. Yes, yes, yes.
It is right for Tyra. And so much of what the documentary has to grapple with ultimately is what was happening on that show. That was sheer lunacy. And some of what went on on the show, if not much of what went on on the show, is in retrospect rather appalling. So let's talk through some of the things that the documentary tries to address. And I want to start with a model named Shandy.
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Chapter 4: How did America's Next Top Model shape the reality TV landscape?
And in the show's version, when you watch it in real time, it's like a drunken hookup. Like, she cheats on her boyfriend in Milan, and that's how it's framed. And her shame is, I can't believe I did this to my boyfriend.
Did your boyfriend cheat on you? He cheated on you? Really?
Everybody's messed up, Shandi. Mm-hmm. When you watch the documentary, it is recast. Not, I wouldn't even just say like, oh, it's a 2026 lens. I don't necessarily think that it is. I think a lot of people still view sexual assault like this and still view drinking and women like this, but she's an adult.
And so now really in her adulthood, she's able to look at this and be like, yeah, that wasn't a place where I could consent.
I think after getting out of the hot tub and like whatever happened after that, I think they should have fucking like, And like, all right, this has gone too far.
Like, we got to, we got to pull her out of this. Does anyone in the documentary, is anyone held to account for the way Shandi was treated?
It's interesting. A lot of people want more responsibility from Tyra, and I get that. She's the face of it, and it's a good person to ask. But these shows are constellations of people. There's a lot of people who work on these shows, and there's a lot of people who have responsibility for it. And some of them are in the doc, and maybe some of them aren't.
But what happened with her is there's five, six, ten people who have to say okay to that. And you keep saying it, and you keep saying it. That is what's interesting to me about how the machine lets that pass. Yeah.
One that I remember, I'm surprised it means so much to me, but there was a model, Dani, who had a beautiful, charming, delightful gap in her front teeth. And she was made to close it. Yeah, they made her fill it. Yeah. Look, it sounds minor. There might be people listening who'll be like, Noelle, that is so minor. I don't know. It was part of Dani's face. It was part of her charm.
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Chapter 5: What were the changing dynamics of reality TV from the early 2000s to now?
It's easy to be a beautiful cover girl. It's not marketable.
Tell me about how the documentary deals with young women being told... Something distinct about you is not right. It's not good enough.
It's a tough gig that Tyra gave herself because she's trying to tell these women, this is how the industry works and these are the things you need to do to be able to thrive in it. At the same time, she is propagating those same things.
So I believed her and I still believe her when she would say, you need to lose weight because you're not going to get a cover girl campaign if you're bigger, which was true at the time. It's still true for a lot of campaigns. Yeah. Her telling Dani, I think you should close your gap, at the time with the information she had, and Tyra says this, this is what I knew with the information that I had.
I kind of believe her.
There were agents that would tell me she will not work with those teeth. It's just not going to happen. That's what they told me.
The show was still interested in moving that narrative forward and making sure that was the tension. The point of the show was the tension between who you were and who you are supposed to become.
Hey, so you watch a documentary, and what did you want to get out of it, and what do you feel like you got out of it? Did it feel like an honest reckoning, an attempt to do something real here, or was it just more sort of patting Tyra on the back for her years of service?
Intent and result is always different, and I don't know what the intent was. But I think with the results, she comes off looking kind of like what we knew her to be, which is like pretty craven, pretty, pretty craven and like pretty aware of what she's done and not not that sorry. And like, yeah, that's what we bought. That's what we paid for. That's what we bought.
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Chapter 6: How has the portrayal of contestants evolved in reality TV?
We are still doing it. These were really young people and they didn't really entirely understand what kind of machine they were getting into. I think competition reality and what it rocked back then is very different than like the Vanderpump Rules or the Real Housewives of today. Those are adults, adults with money often and with family and connection kind of entering these spaces.
These were really vulnerable girls. Some of them had nowhere to go after the end of the show, you know, didn't have family to go back to. But those shows don't succeed and Tyra doesn't put them in blackface and she doesn't make them like walk along a tiny runway between gongs. She doesn't lecture them about how to eat or to take the bread off their burger.
If we don't watch it and then go to work the next day and be like, God, I know like Kenya did look really big in that photo. That only works if we engage with it. And it's hard. It's hard to not engage with it because it's what, you know, the machine wants blood.
Saatchi Cole, she writes about culture for Slate. Her book is called One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. Her other book is called Sucker Punch. Coming up, should we have taken reality TV more seriously?
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Chapter 7: What are the ethical considerations of reality TV production today?
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Today Explained.
My name is Dame Brian Moylan. I am the president and founder of Vulture's Real Housewives Institute. And I have been writing about TV and reality television specifically for a very long time.
All right, so take me back in time. Where does reality TV start? And where does America's Next Top Model fall in that?
There's kind of a couple starting points. One of the biggest was An American Family, which was a PBS show in the 70s.
The Louds are neither average nor typical. No family is. They are not the American family. They are simply an American family.
Which was a documentary just about a real life family, but it was more of a documentary than reality TV as we know it today. The next big milestone was in 1991 when the real world started at MTV. Find out what happens when people stop being polite.
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Chapter 8: Where do we see reality TV heading in the future?
If we were to talk about the last 25 years or so, say, starting with Survivor, how was reality TV made in the early days? Like, what were the tactics?
The tactics, I think, it was kind of an anything-goes atmosphere. It was very Wild Wild West. I mean, if you read about the history of Survivor, the cast on that first season got all sorts of infections and terrible things and... You know, came back with, you know, who knows what kind of parasites, you know?
And so, I don't think people were really prepared for what it was going to take to have real people in front of the camera and also to turn real people into overnight celebrities. You know, there had never been someone like Richard Hatch before who went from being a nobody to being one of the most famous men in America kind of overnight. What's happened in my head is here's the conflict.
Here comes the dynamics that suck. Here come the people that just shout and don't listen. Here comes the negativity and here comes the crap. And I also think that with the producers, there were a lot of people coming out of the documentary space doing it, but there were also a lot of people coming from more tabloidy type backgrounds.
And so there might have been a little bit more exploitation, a little bit more looking for the craziest possible angle, the craziest possible stunts. And it was kind of the bigger and louder and crazier, the better, especially right after Survivor, it became a very crowded marketplace. So you needed something different about you to really stand out.
And then how does it start to change over time?
Well, I think that viewers got hip to reality shows and how they're made and that they're producers, etc. And so I think the expectations of the audience change. And I think because... enough people had watched reality shows, they kind of knew a bit what to expect. And when they went on those shows, you know, what they should and shouldn't be treated like.
But I still think that there's a lot of craziness. There's a lot of exploitation. There's a lot of you know, people pushing buttons and trying to amp up drama. That still goes on. But I think now we know that the production companies have a duty of care to the people who are participating on these shows and the people who are making these shows.
And so that, you know, no one is coming back from Survivor with a parasite anymore. Though there was someone on the last season who got bit by a snake. Come check this out. The snake just came and latched on you. So, I mean, who knows?
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