How Meme Culture is Making America’s Next Top Model Palatable Again

Words: Roda Musa

Even if you’re not old enough to have watched the reality series America’s Next Top Model in its prime, you’re most likely familiar with it through TikTok sound bites (I was rooting for you!), reaction gifs and the occasional think piece dissecting the toxic beauty standards it promoted. Now it’s back on our FYP in a different form. 

One of the most popular TikTok trends right now isn’t a beauty hack or a fun little dance. It’s a joke about trauma. The caption flashes up - POV: You told Tyra your friend overdosed; you had an abortion; your mum fell down the stairs. Cut to modelling poses, changing to the beat of ANTM’s theme tune with an item related to the tragedy, styled in your own suffering. The format is simple, instantly recognisable, and a quick laugh. The perfect formula to go viral. 

It’s strange timing, particularly since it wasn’t long ago that we collectively decided the show was indefensible. With the clarity of hindsight, we can identify that abuse was reframed as an editorial concept, vulnerability as storyline, and breakdowns were used to drive ratings.

The recent Netflix docu-series, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, exposed the darker infrastructure of the show - it was worse than any of us could have imagined. The show featured former contestants recounting grim processes, from coercive production tactics, racial microaggressions, body shaming, and photoshoots that felt like torture experiments. Experiences that left most of them unable to work in the modelling industry once the cameras quit rolling. 
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“ANTM was not just a modelling competition; it stole these women’s dreams and taught a generation that suffering was transformative. The cycle is efficient. Harm becomes discourse. Discourse becomes memes. The memes make way for a comeback. The stain of time fades just enough for it to be considered stylish again.”

Shandi Sullivan, 21 at the time, viewed the show as a golden ticket to escape her dead-end job in Kansas. Instead, one of the most horrifying experiences of her life was broadcast to millions. The series is careful, possibly for legal reasons, to not explicitly name the encounter between her and a male model as sexual assault, but Shandi states that she was unaware of what was happening. She was drunk, exhausted and had eaten very little, leaving her incapable of consenting to what would take place. Her and many of the other women are still battling the psychological ramifications decades later. 

I grew up on ANTM, rushing home to watch reruns, seduced by the glamour, melodrama and chaos alike. It was both surreal and aspirational; my friends even spoke of wanting to apply. Back then it didn’t feel exploitative, a fever dream of early 2000s fashion television.

Reality television has always thrived on engineered conflict, but ANTM was incredibly blunt with it. It was a particular kind of spectacle; young beautiful women pushed to emotional extremes in the name of fashion and beauty. Their breakdowns were amusing because they were painted as vain, weak, even spoilt, reinforced by Jay Manuel rolling his eyes at their tears during the extreme makeovers the show specialised in. Their distress was our entertainment, and we continued to recycle it as reaction gifs over the years since the shot stopped. 

When the docuseries was released, it sparked outrage. The show’s most infamous scenes were unpacked by the women who experienced it, telling us firsthand the harm it inflicted upon them. Of course they had breakdowns: their insecurities were picked apart, they were starved, the producers encouraged fights.

But almost as quickly as the condemnation emerged, so did the TikTok trends. Irony took over criticism. I watched as the same heart wrenching stories and testimonies were recut as meme templates. Even Tyra, who came across as utterly reprehensible, has been given a new lease of life. The rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia are working in her favour with ‘fierce’ archival runway clips used as justifications for her insane outbursts. In internet logic, villains make good content. 

Meme culture has a peculiar talent for converting the deplorable into the digestible. It doesn’t deny the harm (because that’s the joke), but it flattens it. Peeling away the context and complexity until it’s easily consumed. The memes become a form of marketing, rehabilitating it into becoming acceptable again. 

When Tyra teased a new season at the end of the docu-series, it felt inevitable. The uncomfortable truth is that while we weren’t the masterminds behind ANTM’s exploitation (many of us were children at the time) we are paving the way for its comeback into the mainstream. This generation can easily spot racism, fatphobia and misogyny, but that doesn’t stop us from engaging with it callously. In fact, it often fuels our fascination - the worse a clip is the quicker it spreads. 

The former contestants of the show don’t experience those moments as a Y2K throwback, they’re harrowing memories, ones that we’ve remixed into a Frankenstein-style collage of edits, templates and punchlines. 

It’s easy to make fun of ANTM because it was so ridiculous, they had contestants swapping races, dodging giant swinging pendulums and cosplaying as homeless. But ANTM was not just a modelling competition; it stole these women’s dreams and taught a generation that suffering was transformative. The cycle is efficient. Harm becomes discourse. Discourse becomes memes. The memes make way for a comeback. The stain of time fades just enough for it to be considered stylish again.