How America’s Next Top Model became a TV horror show

Looking back on it with a 2025 lens

It will be interesting to see how the perception of the show is shifted yet again by the airing of the Netflix series. Banks takes the chance in it to express some regret for what went on: “I knew I went too far. I lost it…” she says of her infamous moment of anger. Mok, too, is remorseful: “I take full responsibility for that shoot,” he says of the infamous “crime scene”-themed challenge. “That was a mistake. I look back now and I think it was a celebration of, like, violence. It was crazy. That one I look back on and am like, ‘you were an idiot’.”

Not everyone agrees with relitigating the show, though. Season one winner Adrianne Curry refused to participate in Reality Check and has spoken out against it, suggesting it is futile to judge decades-old shows according to today’s standards. “I think people psychoanalysing it over 20 years later with a woke lens is absurd,” she wrote on social media.

But it’s important even for older shows to have a reckoning, says Lindemann, and to acknowledge its impact, good and bad, on society. “I do think it’s valid to say, ‘Knowing what I know now, viewing this cultural work doesn’t give me the same pleasure anymore, because I recognise its harms,” she says. “Because you have direct knowledge that it harmed the people who participated in it and/or it contributed to a broader social harm like sexism or racism. This is not to say that everyone who participated in a problematic show is an absolute monster – just that we have a different lens for viewing it now. That said, there are some problematic aspects of the show that should have gotten the side-eye from us, even at the time.”

“ANTM was very much a product of its time,” she adds. “To me, it’s always been very much a reflectionof what the modelling industry was like at the time – or at least a funhouse mirror reflection.” 

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model is released on Netflix on 16 February.