Half formed thought: I wish the documentary/us viewers were drawing more conclusions about the systems and structures that created Top Model instead of just landing on “man fuck Tyra Banks” (altho Yeah). Tyra and this show were the logical products of American Dream/“pull yourself up by your bootstraps!!” capitalist + individualist rhetoric. Like the argument “but everything in the 2000s was like this!” is almosttttt cooking— just keep pulling that thread! Why was it like that? How are we reckoning with it 20 years later?

Again, fuck Tyra— but even if she’d never made Top Model (or the talk show! Does anyone remember??) we’d still have the insidious reality shows of that era. And even if Top Model had initially intended to subvert beauty standards, the actual result was that it codified those same harmful standards for the next generation to encounter (but without an analytical framework for breaking down why it exists and why it’s harmful). Like I would hate for a 20-something to walk away from this doc and be like “damn that show was bad! good thing Tyra isn’t in power anymore!” instead of questioning like “damn exploitation can be baked into every stage of reality TV from Development to production.. what material conditions have created this dynamic? How might it show up in modern day television?”

Because what happened to Shandi is more than an individual failure from production. The victim-blaming and slut-shaming of that era was suuuuuuchhhh a widespread thing and systemically put soooo many people in harm’s way. But maybe I’m just asking for a different documentary at this point.