Welcome back to Second Thought. I’m in the driver’s seat this week because Suzy heard me ranting about how I’ve had it with documentaries about early-aughts reality shows being highly abusive. I was there at the time; I remember. Buckle up.
The new Netflix docuseries Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model opens with a flurry of Zoomer influencers staring into their phones cameras, mouths aghast in feigned horror and outrage. Headlines pop up across the screen: “The TV That Aged like Milk,” “The Problem with America’s Next Top Model,” “The Legacy of America’s Next Top Model Is Anything but Fierce.” To borrow a phrase, the past is a foreign country, one where a size six was fat and Tyra Banks could force aspiring supermodels to dress up like homeless people, drug addicts, and different races. But now we’re a new people in a new land, and it’s time for everyone to atone for the sins of who we once were: television viewers in 2003.
Reality Check is the latest production of what I like to call the Reckoning Industrial Complex. Prominent examples from the last few years include Quiet on Set (about the Nickelodeon channel being terrible behind the scenes), White Hot (about Abercrombie & Fitch being terrible behind the scenes), and Britney vs Spears (about Britney Spears’s life being terrible behind the scenes).
The formula goes something like this: Take a pop-culture product from roughly two decades ago, point out how unsavory it was in retrospect—even if this was obvious and remarked upon at the time—then make the viewer feel somehow complicit, and then offer some fairly tepid insight from behind the scenes.
