How America’s Next Top Model turned into a horror TV show

Looking back at it with a 2025 lens

It will be interesting to see how the concept of the show changes again with the streaming of the Netflix series. Banks takes the opportunity to express some remorse for what happened: “I knew I went too far. I lost her…” she says of her infamous moment of rage. Mock also feels remorse: “I take full responsibility for this photo shoot,” he says of the popular “Crime Scene” challenge. “It was a mistake. I look back now and think it was a celebration of violence. It was madness. This is the person I look at and say: ‘I was a fool.'”

However, not everyone agrees to reconsider the offer. Season 1 winner Adrianne Curry declined to participate in Reality Check and spoke out against it, suggesting that it’s pointless to judge shows decades old by today’s standards. “I think it’s ridiculous that people are psychoanalyzing 20+ years later using a woke lens,” she wrote on social media.

But it’s important even for older shows to have a reckoning, Lindemann says, and acknowledge their impact, good and bad, on society. “I think it is correct to say: Knowing what I know now, watching this cultural work no longer gives me the same pleasure, because I realize its harms,” she says. “Because you have first-hand knowledge that it harmed the people who participated in it and/or that it contributed to broader social harm such as sexism or racism. This does not mean that everyone who participated in a problematic show is an absolute monster — but we have a different lens for viewing it now. However, there are some problematic aspects of the show that should have received our attention, even at the time.”

“ANTM was very much a product of its time,” she adds. “For me, it was always a reflection of what the modeling industry was like at the time – Or at least the mirror reflection of fun.

Reality checkInside America’s Next Top Model premieres on Netflix on February 16.