Lent 2026, Day 4: Wanna be on top?

Did you watch the Netflix documentary on America’s Next Top Model? Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model features the “Models, judges and “ANTM” insiders — including Tyra Banks” as they “look back at the reality show’s complicated legacy.” Complicated and messy.

The New York Times has a great article on it: “In the ‘Top Model’ Docuseries, Tyra Is No Longer in Control”:

[Tyra Banks] was given no approval power over the documentary, no questions in advance and no compensation, two of the series’s executive producers said. Banks wasn’t able to watch the docuseries until the broader public could: on Monday, when it began streaming on Netflix.

The arrangement (or lack thereof) is something of a coup in a field crowded with celebrity documentaries in which stars trade access for control, often as executive producers. The documentary is also a study of a public figure seeking to protect her own legacy. Styled in a trench coat and made up by a glam squad, Banks expresses a careful mixture of regret and justification as she is confronted with the perspectives of contestants who say the show left them feeling torn down or humiliated.

For Banks, 52, who had watched as a surge of interest in the show during the pandemic led to an internet pile-on, the decision to participate was no doubt a calculation. The mostly negative public reception that her appearance has thus far elicited, however, isn’t likely to inspire other embattled celebrities to race to the interview chair. (A personal representative declined to make her available to answer questions about the series.)

“It’s a shame that she wasn’t willing to be a little more vulnerable in this documentary,” Jay Manuel, a longtime on-camera personality and creative director on “Top Model,” said in a video interview last week. “Because what I saw was Television Tyra.’”

…

“Hindsight is 20/20 for all of us,” Banks says. “It just so happens that a lot of the things that are 20/20 for me happened in front of the world.”

Before this documentary, currently the most popular series on Netflix, Banks had said little about the recent cultural reassessment of the show. Confronted with a parade of the show’s faux pas, Banks can be frank. This was pre-2020 reality television, and it’s not as if the modeling industry was ever known for its gentle, progressive nature.

Well, it’s 2026, and Tyra’s getting eaten up. See here, here, or here. I watched it earlier this week, and she comes off terribly. So much of the show has aged like spoiled milk, and she can’t just wave away accountability because it happened back when low riders and flip phones were all the rage.

The New York Times article is subtitled, “Tyra Banks seemed almost omnipotent on her long-running reality series “America’s Next Top Model.” In a new documentary, she is merely a subject.” In our lives, we push to project composure, confidence, and calm. Social media has supercharged these projections; we post curated carousels of filtered pics and edited vids.

Yet, in the end, we can’t control everything.

We can’t control most things.