Cory Stillman
Netflix’s Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model is one of several recent documentaries to reckon with the dark side of the pop culture institutions of the early 2000s. It may not come as a major surprise that, in retrospect, Next Top Model was perpetuating harmful beauty standards and outdated notions of sexuality and consent. But for Reality Check editors Stefanie Maridueña, ACE, Austin Flack, and Mimi Wilcox, that sentiment was only the jumping-off point for a three-part series designed to open the eyes of both newcomers and longstanding fans of the Tyra Banks-led competition series.
“I hadn’t watched America’s Next Top Model when it originally aired, but because so many of ANTM’s characters and conflicts have taken on a life of their own online, I had a lot of familiarity with the series’ signature moments,” says Flack. “Netflix was very invested in ensuring that the series resonated with younger viewers who, like myself, had only encountered ANTM through memes and pop culture references, and I think my perspective in the edit helped us achieve that.”
Interrogating a property with such an outsized legacy can be a tricky task, poking and prodding at both individual and brand reputations. Of course, the name most synonymous with ANTM is Banks herself, and Reality Check was fortunate enough to have access to her in the form of rather raw and probing interviews. The intent was not to play a game of “gotcha” with Banks, but rather to allow the former model and producer to confront in real-time the long and complicated shadow her show has cast.
“It was very important to all of us to give her a chance to tell her side of the story without letting her force of personality overwhelm the other voices,” Flack says. “That balance was something we were very deliberate about.”
Of course, the former contestants sit at the center of Reality Check and the story it is trying to tell. Naturally, these are the figures with whom the editors developed the most intimate relationships as they combed through hours of interview and archival footage.
“During my time focusing on episode 1, I was so moved by Ebony,” says Wilcox, who last spoke to Awards Radar in 2024 about her Emmy-nominated work on Escaping Twin Flames. “For one thing, she’s an incredibly dynamic storyteller and such a magnetic presence! But I was also struck by how representative her experience on the show was of the central issues with ANTM. She was brought on the show in celebration of her beauty as a dark-skinned Black woman with a shaved head. But over the course of cycle 1, she was punished for exactly those qualities and felt horribly betrayed by Tyra. At the same time, she celebrated the show’s tender and honest depiction of her relationship with her girlfriend, which was so rare in television at the time.”
Maridueña shared a similar sentiment about Shandi, who contacted her after the documentary premiered on Netflix to tell her how happy she was with the final product.
“Her experience was challenging to edit, not only because of what she endured but because the impact on her was still so palpable after all these years. I felt a strong responsibility to handle her story with utmost care and empower her to own her narrative. We all shared that sentiment for Shandi.”
Those kinds of connections to contestants and the show at large made the experience of editing Reality Check uniquely personal for all three members of the team.
“One of the things that unsettled me during the edit was how susceptible I still felt to ANTM’s harmful messaging around bodies and body image,” says Wilcox. “I was so surprised to find myself thinking differently about my own body while working on the series every day and being steeped in that messaging. It really hammered home for me just how much the show negatively shaped so many people’s understanding of what body shapes were considered worthy. That said, revisiting ANTM and our interviews with the J’s and queer models on the show made me appreciate the positive impact it had on so many young LGBTQ+ people in a new way.”
Reality Check beautifully captures those contradictory elements of ANTM’s long-lasting legacy, and it is well worth a watch on Netflix today.
Check out our full conversation with the documentary’s editing team below!
Hi everyone! Could you each talk a bit about what drew you to this project and how you got involved?
Stefanie Maridueña, ACE: I got involved when EverWonder Studio reached out and asked for my availability and interest. Of course, I was immediately excited and perked up when I learned the show was about America’s Next Top Model. I was a fan of the show when I was a teenager and, like many others, was undoubtedly influenced by it (I still have photos from the “photoshoots” my friends and I did together!). I understood right away that it was going to be a unique edit; it’s not every day that you get to work on a project about a cultural phenomenon with that kind of influence and reach. But on a personal level, I was also curious to revisit and re-examine what I had been exposed to at a young age as well as how it affected other people from my generation and beyond. I kept thinking of this experience as opening a time capsule holding a very nuanced and complicated legacy, but also a lot of fun and intriguing moments.
Austin Flack: Netflix brought me to EverWonder for the series, and I jumped at it. I hadn’t watched America’s Next Top Model when it originally aired, but because so many of ANTM’s characters and conflicts have taken on a life of their own online, I had a lot of familiarity with the series’ signature moments. Netflix was very invested in ensuring that the series resonated with younger viewers who, like myself, had only encountered ANTM through memes and pop culture references, and I think my perspective in the edit helped us achieve that.
Mimi Wilcox: I had previously worked with Netflix on Escaping Twin Flames, and I was thrilled when they reached out to me for Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model because I was such a fan of ANTM growing up. I was totally captivated by the creativity of the photoshoots, and I in part credit ANTM’s queer representation with helping me identify my own bisexuality as a teenager. Of course, like many people, I had seen the reckoning over the show playing out on social media, and I was eager to revisit that complicated legacy with this series. I’m always interested in projects where an unexpected hook leads you to deeper conclusions, and I saw the opportunity for that kind of storytelling in Reality Check. I also love to work with archival material as an editor, and seeing the 24 cycles of ANTM as an enormous archive was a really fun way to approach the edit.
How did Reality Check evolve over the course of the editing process?
SM: The edit was constantly evolving because we had a lot of elements to work with and different directions to explore. Throughout this process, we experimented with the placement of different anecdotes across the three episodes, but we also wanted to prioritize clarity and accuracy for how events in the show transpired. We knew that, inherently, part of that process would be following the show chronologically from its inception through to its cancellation. But then the personal stories of the models and judges allowed us to conceptualize the show’s evolution from an industry trailblazer into something a little more damning.
AF: We knew pretty early on that hewing too closely to ANTM chronology would flatten the emotional experience for the viewer, so we spent a lot of time moving our featured models’ stories around between episodes, trying to layer their individual experiences in a way that ultimately constructed a collective narrative about how the series evolved and the toll that took on the women at the center of it.
MW: Mor & Daniel are bold, brilliant directors, and they are never afraid to take a big swing in reshaping the storytelling if it serves the series. We made lots of significant changes over the course of the edit in all three episodes. I can give one detailed example from episode 1, which underwent several major structural changes as we refined the approach. Initially, the idea was to represent models from all different cycles in their experience of arriving on the show for the first time; that is, for the beginning of Reality Check to introduce us to the concept of the beginning of each cycle, rather than the beginning of the show as a whole. But we found that that approach wasn’t really landing emotionally, because we wanted to spend more time getting to know each of these models and their stories as we met them, rather than introducing them in passing in service of a thematic chorus. I was given a week to go deep on each of our cycle 1 models’ interviews and the archive of cycle 1 itself, and see whether there was strong enough material to focus our first episode on that cycle. And it soon became clear to me both that our cycle 1 models were powerful emotional storytellers who could carry an episode, and that the story of cycle 1 was critical to understanding the show as a whole. I will also never forget the day that I rewatched the entirety of cycle 1, taking copious notes, in one day… A very fun “I can’t believe this is my job” moment!
Can you also tell us more about the division of labor and overall collaboration between you three on this series?
SM: Initially, we each had an episode that we started out with. As the edit went on, we started jumping around episodes and passing scenes back and forth between each other, but a bulk of my work was in episodes 2 and 3. Occasionally, the team would take an all-hands-on-deck approach to ensure an episode met its deadline. Our directors, Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, also identified our individual strengths, so they based assignments in a way that put that to good use and helped the series develop in an efficient manner. I loved working alongside Mimi and Austin for this reason. Watching their approach to different scenes was inspiring and invigorating. Mimi did a wonderful job shaping the storyline of the show’s creation in episode one and how things fell apart in episode 3. There are so many memorable moments she edited, but one of my favorites was her intercut of the judges and Tyra Banks repeatedly saying “no” as Tyra recounts executives’ reactions when she was initially pitching ANTM to TV networks. It was such a creative approach that echoed the amount of rejection that Tyra faced at the beginning. Similarly, Austin was also great at building energetic and fun sequences like the infamous “Rooting for You” moment in the cold open of episode 3. Watching their work and how they approached things is something I’ve taken with me after working on the show. It’s lovely that our collaboration gave us the opportunity to learn from one another and collectively elevate the final product.
AF: I spent the most of my time on Episode 2, which included a segment we called “Extreme Photoshoots”—a high-energy montage of the increasingly outrageous ways the show tried to one-up itself season after season. But the work I’m most proud of is the Tiffany storyline, which ended up in Episode 3. The single most famous moment in ANTM history happens to Tiffany (“We were rooting for you, we were all rooting for you!”), and it’s been so thoroughly meme-ified that most people only know it as a punchline. But as Jay Manuel says in his interview, there really wasn’t anything funny about what happened in that room. Tiffany didn’t participate in the documentary, which made it a real editorial challenge to give her experience the weight and dignity it deserved. It was very gratifying to see how that moment resonated with audiences in online commentary after our series aired.
MW: My favorite thing about editing series is the ability to collaborate with other editors. Editors are my favorite people, so I don’t usually mind having more of those cooks in the kitchen! I was initially responsible for episode 3 when I joined the show. But later, when we decided to do an overhaul in our approach to episode 1, I took over recutting that episode. For the last month of the edit, I worked across all three episodes to picture lock the show.
As the edit progressed, the lines of who was working on what episode certainly blurred! While we each tried to be the point person for a particular episode, our scenes inevitably moved around over the course of the edit. In documentary filmmaking, there is only so much scripting you can do ahead of time; you have to respond to the material that you actually have in front of you, and so much writing happens in the edit. So while there was some scaffolding for each episode that held true throughout the process, we did lots of exchanging of scenes with one another as we realized they provided stronger dramatic tension in one episode or another. I loved inheriting a scene from Stef or Austin and learning from the choices they had made, or passing a scene of mine on to them and seeing how they elevated it.
The show features some really probing interviews with Tyra Banks. How did you work to maintain the raw honesty of the series investigation while still preserving her established reputation and legacy?
SM: Having access to Tyra Banks and her perspective was monumental in telling her story. Similarly, having access to everyone else that was involved in the show, from the judges to Ken Mok, to the show’s contestants, helped us focus the narrative and get a full picture of what was happening behind the scenes. It was important for all of us, as documentarians, to present the story of America’s Next Top Model as it unfolded. This means that a lot of things can be true at the same time, and is part of what made the documentary so fascinating to edit.
AF: As much as our intention was to foreground the stories of the models who competed on the show, Tyra is obviously at the center of everything when it comes to ANTM. In her interview, you can see so much of what made her a pop culture icon—and also some of the ways her carefully crafted image sits in tension with decisions that were made on the show. It was very important to all of us to give her a chance to tell her side of the story without letting her force of personality overwhelm the other voices. That balance was something we were very deliberate about.
There are also so many great interviews with former contestants. Do you have a favorite figure or moment from the series?
SM: The models were the heart of this series, and each of them was delightful in their own way. While I wouldn’t single out a “favorite,” I did feel particularly protective of Shandi after working on her story. Her experience was challenging to edit, not only because of what she endured but because the impact on her was still so palpable after all these years. I felt a strong responsibility to handle her story with utmost care and empower her to own her narrative. We all shared that sentiment for Shandi. After the documentary premiered, I learned that she was very pleased with the show, which truly meant a great deal to me. I hope it was a healing experience for her. I also spent a lot of time working on Dani’s story. I loved her energy because she had such a commanding presence. She was also really funny in both the archival and the present-day footage, which made working on her beats quite enjoyable. She’s a strong woman, and her resilience really resonated with me.
AF: I did a lot of work on Keenyah’s storyline, which I found incredibly compelling. Her experience on ANTM sits at the intersection of two of the most painful threads we explore in the series—body shaming and sexual harassment—and she speaks pointedly about the effects her experience had on her, and on the young women watching at home. There’s a moment where we intercut a TikTok from a woman who says that when she was a teenager, seeing Keenyah, a very beautiful and slender woman, get body-shamed on ANTM gave her an eating disorder. While the models’ experiences were always at the heart of our narrative, the moments where we were able to trace Top Model’s broader cultural footprint were what elevated the series beyond a simple pop culture retrospective.
MW: During my time focusing on episode 1, I was so moved by Ebony. For one thing, she’s an incredibly dynamic storyteller and such a magnetic presence! But I was also struck by how representative her experience on the show was of the central issues with ANTM. She was brought on the show in celebration of her beauty as a dark-skinned Black woman with a shaved head. But over the course of cycle 1, she was punished for exactly those qualities and felt horribly betrayed by Tyra. At the same time, she celebrated the show’s tender and honest depiction of her relationship with her girlfriend, which was so rare in television at the time. For all the complexities of that dynamic to become clear even in the very first cycle of the show was striking to me, and I became a fierce advocate for centering Ebony’s story.
What kind of research went into the project from an editorial standpoint?
SM: We felt it was important for the documentary to acknowledge the culture of the time and how this influenced what was happening on America’s Next Top Model. ANTM didn’t occur in a vacuum after all. There were magazines constantly telling women and young girls to lose weight, models and actresses were publicly shamed for their figures, and beauty was narrowly defined as thin and white. It was inescapable, and a lot of us internalized it. Providing this context was integral to helping our audience understand why the show’s initial premise to highlight the beauty of all different shapes and races was truly groundbreaking, but also why nobody flinched when it dipped into troubling territory.
AF: I had to do a lot of research because I had never seen an episode of Top Model! But aside from binging as many episodes as I could to get up to speed, one moment of research that really stood out came while I was working on the Extreme Photoshoots segment about all the shocking ways the series’ challenges began to go off the rails. We went searching for contemporary print and media reactions to some of ANTM’s most infamous moments, such as the race-swapping shoots, and found almost nothing. Our producing team was able to find mountains of outraged reaction videos from viewers who rediscovered the series on Hulu during the pandemic, but it was genuinely striking how little outrage these moments generated when the series originally aired.
MW: We worked to identify many of the moments from the show that most deeply impacted and lingered with viewers. For the first time in my career, I was able to go to Reddit for research! It was helpful to scroll through people’s recollections to understand all the different ways that ANTM affected people and the moments we might particularly want to spotlight and dig deeper into. I also appreciated learning more about Tyra’s incredible career and what her career represented in the context of the modeling industry. While I was a big fan of ANTM when it aired, I never knew much about modeling as a career or the fashion industry. Gaining a deeper understanding of the significance of Tyra’s career and what she meant to so many young women and Black women in particular was so critical to understanding both the origins and the betrayals of ANTM.
Reality Check seems to follow in a larger trend of documentaries reckoning with the dark side to pop culture institutions of the early 2000s. Why do you think that might be, and how did the show change your personal relationship to America’s Next Top Model?
SM: In the case of America’s Next Top Model and as we highlight in the documentary, old clips of the show resurfaced on social media in 2020 and became popular with a new generation for entirely different reasons. Their critical analysis of the show brought up some valid and overdue discourse. I love that we were able to bring that to a larger audience through Netflix, while also providing a behind-the-scenes perspective from the people who were in those rooms when it all happened. I don’t think that my personal relationship with America’s Next Top Model changed much, but reexamining the show as an adult has given me a deeper appreciation for the positives I took from it while reminding me to be gentle with myself for any of the negatives that I absorbed.
AF: I didn’t have a personal relationship with Top Model going in, but I spent a sizeable chunk of my career editing reality television, so I have a lot of feelings about what the genre has done to us. Reality TV didn’t stay on television. It’s colonized our politics, our media, our whole idea of what fame is. It seems worth understanding where that started. And Top Model is an absolutely critical piece of the puzzle.
MW: One of the things that unsettled me during the edit was how susceptible I still felt to ANTM’s harmful messaging around bodies and body image. I was so surprised to find myself thinking differently about my own body while working on the series every day and being steeped in that messaging. It really hammered home for me just how much the show negatively shaped so many people’s understanding of what body shapes were considered worthy. That said, revisiting ANTM and our interviews with the J’s and queer models on the show made me appreciate the positive impact it had on so many young LGBTQ+ people in a new way. For better and for worse, working on Reality Check made me reckon with just how significant ANTM was to my experience growing up.
Is there anything else you would like to add about the editorial process on Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model?
SM: It’s truly a unique, introspective opportunity as an editor to work with material that you and people around you have a prior connection to. I remembered watching the contestants that we interviewed as a preteen. And while it was fun to revisit the creativity of the photoshoots, Miss Jay’s unapologetic personality and Tyra coining the term “smize,” I also remembered Keenyah being told that speaking up during sexual harassment was unprofessional, and Dani getting asked to undergo surgery to close her signature gap. These moments had a profound and lasting impact on those of us who watched the show when it first aired. Being able to closely examine these nuances and complexities of America’s Next Top Model’s legacy was fascinating, and witnessing the series’ reception in the media, the wider audience, and even my friend circles has been gratifying. It’s a reminder of how lucky I am for the opportunity to work on Emmy-contending shows like Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model and the impact that comes with it.
AF: I’m really grateful to have worked alongside my two excellent colleagues, Stefanie and Mimi, to help bring Mor and Daniel’s vision to life. It was a truly collaborative process, and I’m immensely proud of what we made together. Also, I had a lot of fun!
MW: It was profound to revisit a beloved show from my childhood and grapple with its legacy in the edit as an adult, and it’s something I’d love to do more of (can I get in on a Buffy the Vampire Slayer documentary?!) I am really grateful to have worked with these exceptional filmmakers and editors, and I am so proud of the work that this whole team put into making Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model an Emmy-contending series.
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