In Netflix’s America’s Next Top Model Doc, A Harrowing Story Reveals the Ethical Fog of Reality TV

I didn’t expect a Netflix documentary series about America’s Next Top Model to make me think about warfare, but in retrospect the connection isn’t so surprising. Reality TV production and military operations have plenty in common; in both cases, authority figures formulate a strategy and pass orders down a chain of command to be enacted by underlings who will each, in turn, be forced to make high-stakes decisions as dangerous, unpredictable situations unfold. Human behavior and any number of environmental variables can make it impossible to carry out those plans, or to judge what their outcome will be even if perfectly executed—or, by extension, who is to blame when some unforeseen catastrophe happens. The term of art for this sort of battlefield confusion is fog of war. I would argue that there’s such a thing as the fog of reality TV, too.

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The three-part series Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, now streaming on Netflix, includes a tragic case in point. Co-created and hosted by Tyra Banks, the reality competition in which amateur beauties vied for the titular title and a modeling contract, among other prizes, ran for 24 seasons on three different networks (UPN, The CW, VH1) between 2003 and 2018. Initially a surprise hit, Top Model was controversial for roughly as long as it was popular. Nasty judges, ill-advised challenges, behind-the-scenes drama, and careless treatment of young contestants’ health, both physical and mental, divided fans. The show also catalyzed some of the most iconic moments in reality TV history, chief among them Banks’ endlessly memed Season 4 tirade: “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!” There was more to that breakdown than most of us recall, and the often-insightful Reality Check does a decent job of contextualizing it. More telling, though, is its belated postmortem of what is probably the most harrowing incident in the show’s history. When it comes to the fog of reality TV, what goes unsaid about Shandi Sullivan’s ordeal in Milan is at least as disturbing as what we discover.

Sullivan, who sat for an emotional interview with the documentary’s directors, Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, was a 21-year-old finalist in Top Model’s second season (for some reason, the show referred to seasons as cycles). Flush with funds following a breakout debut, the producers sent a handful of contestants to the fashion capital for the final leg of the competition. And one night, they invited a few handsome Italian men who had served as their moped chauffeurs for a previous challenge to hang out at their lavish temporary home. Wine flowed. A conveniently placed hot tub bubbled, as the models and their maybe-dates crowded in. Memories blurred.

The subsequent episode—in which Sullivan, who had a serious boyfriend at home, is seen making out with one of the men—framed the incident as a simple case of infidelity. Titled “The Girl Who Cheated,” it lingers longer on the aftermath of that night than it does on the sexual encounter itself. We see her alone in pajamas, weeping. “I think a part of me got caught up in everything, just caught up in the sexual tension,” Sullivan, a slight, timid Avril Lavigne lookalike desperate to leave her job at Walgreens, says in a confessional. She doesn’t seem to blame anyone but herself: “No one tried to pull me aside and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ But you know what? I don’t expect them to, because I should be able to take care of myself. I did this. It’s my fault.” In their own interviews, her castmates range from apathetic to lightly judgmental.

As a challenge unfolds that requires the women to pair up for a somewhat Sapphic, nude photoshoot, Sullivan continues to deal with the fallout. In the most crushing scene of the episode, she calls her boyfriend, Eric, and tells him she had sex with another man. Viewers can hear his entire side of the conversation, too; among other harsh words, he calls her a “stupid bitch.” After he hangs up, the cameras hold on Sullivan, curled up in fetal position, her whole body shaking with sobs. In a later phone call, Eric softens: “I’m mad at you, but it’s subsiding.” By then, Sullivan has debriefed with a big-sisterly Banks, who is mostly non-judgmental but also advises: “We have to fight against our carnal desires.” At the elimination, a different contestant is sent home, and it seems as though the worst of Sullivan’s shame and distress are over.

Reality Check tells a very different story, though one it’s careful, maybe for legal reasons, to avoid labeling as sexual assault. (It doesn’t name the man with whom Sullivan spent the night, either.) Now in her 40s, Sullivan reflects that Top Model cast her as “the ugly duckling [turning into] the swan,” recalling that she “finally felt pretty and had some confidence that I didn’t have before.” According to Banks’ co-creator, Ken Mok: “A lot of these girls came from very difficult family backgrounds, who were not supported by their mom or their dad… They were coming to the show to get validation.” A clip from earlier in the Top Model season shows Sullivan talking about being the “black sheep” of a family that barely noticed when she moved out at 18. “I haven’t felt loved by my parents, probably since I was a little,” she says in the present. The Milan trip boosted her confidence, as she excelled in shoots and got glowing feedback from photographers.

Sullivan’s retrospective account of the night she supposedly cheated is worth reproducing at length, though readers sensitive to depictions of sexual trauma might want to skip these quotes:

I don’t think I’d eaten anything at all or had any sleep. I remember getting in the hot tub. I remember [fellow contestants] April and Mercedes getting in the hot tub. And then I just remember the guy looking at me, and I looked at him, and I was pretty drunk at that point. Everything kind of after that is just a blur. All I remember is just like, just like remember him on top of me. I was blacked out. No one did anything to stop it. And it all got filmed, all of it.

In the following Reality Checked episode, she elaborates:

I just remember little bits and pieces. I remember being in the shower, and then just sitting in the shower, and then we were in the bed. I was blacked out for a lot of it. I didn’t even feel sex happening. I just knew it was happening. And then I’ve passed out.

Between these two heartbreaking reminiscences, the filmmakers question a visibly uncomfortable Banks—who, to her credit, participated in the making of a documentary she had to know wouldn’t be entirely flattering—about Sullivan. Her response is, to put it mildly, unsatisfying: “I do remember her story. It’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because I’m… that’s not my territory.” Mok, who Banks later notes was the show’s head of story, is more straightforward. “We treated Top Model as a documentary,” he says. “And we told the girls that.” They knew that cameras would be following them 24/7, Mok says, with solo bathroom trips as the only exception. (As Jay Manuel, Top Model’s creative director and a consultant on the docuseries, explains, the crew did follow Sullivan and the unnamed man to the shower, capturing footage that ultimately wasn’t aired, because of course she wasn’t alone.)

Be that as it may, Sullivan and the other aspiring models were essentially college aged. Among the alleged and implicit factors influencing her behavior were intoxication, hunger, culture shock, and nerves. The opinion that sobriety is a necessary condition for consent was by no means marginal in the early 2000s. (That being said, one problem with Reality Check is its scant engagement with the cultural climate of its era. This was a time when tabloids tormented female celebrities, some of whom were still teenagers, and Girls Gone Wild built a soft-porn empire on pestering party girls to take their tops off.) So it doesn’t seem naive or ahistorical when Sullivan says, in the doc, that she thinks production should’ve intervened—not to stop her from “cheating” on Eric by kissing a man in a hot tub, but after they exited the tub and the encounter went farther. Even if Top Model had been adhering to the highest of cinéma vérité standards (it wasn’t), the failure to intervene with an allegedly blacked-out Sullivan, as well as the decision to continue filming her ordeal that night and in the days that followed, would’ve been an ugly one.

But whose fault was it? This is where the fog of reality TV descends, as foot soldiers follow orders that don’t account for situations like the one they’re in, while their leaders are too removed from the battlefield to make informed decisions. Sullivan recounts that she did get an apology, at the time, from the crew that captured her awful first phone call with Eric: “It was just the sound guy and the guy filming, and afterwards I’m just, like, laying on the floor in a fetal position, just crying, and they just, like, get up to leave. And they both came up to me and they said, ‘We’re really, really sorry that we had to film that.’ They just knew that this isn’t right.” Yet they clearly didn’t think they had the authority to refuse to document a call that had, after all, been set up by production on what Sullivan says was the condition that it happen on camera.

As for Banks and Mok, who do express regret and take blame for less egregious lapses in judgment at other points in Reality Check, we get the sense that they don’t feel especially responsible for how the incident was handled. (Top Model’s third co-creator, Kenya Barris, who went on to become a name-brand TV maker, is conspicuously absent from the docuseries.) In their interviews with Loushy and Sivan, both note that they left much of the relevant material on the cutting-room floor. Looking back at the episode, that does ring true—though Manuel suggests the choice was less about discretion and more about squeamishness around sexual content on broadcast television following Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s notorious Super Bowl halftime show “wardrobe malfunction.” The question remains: If Top Model failed Sullivan, and yet neither the crew members who were on site with her nor the executive producers were responsible for the exploitation of her pain, who is culpable?

The fact that there’s no satisfying answer, that everyone involved in an incident that, understandably, continues to haunt Sullivan, refuses to accept blame for it constitutes Reality Check’s most powerful indictment of reality TV. Its accounts of outsize personalities, judges’ infighting, culturally insensitive photo shoots, manipulative producing, network executives betraying producers who in turn betrayed talent—all of this comes standard with tales from the annals of the entertainment industry. Sullivan’s story is darker, in part because the refusal of responsibility leaves it unresolved. Two decades later, the fog of reality TV has yet to lift.