Set It Off is one of those movies that I’ll always happily recommend—it has great group chemistry, some crackerjack movie star performances (especially from Queen Latifah and Vivica A. Fox), and some thrilling heist scenes. But it’s also emotionally gutting pretty much all the way through. You love these women immediately, then watch the world grind them down enough that armed bank robbery seems like a reasonable choice for all of them. Plus, it’s less of an Ocean’s 11, ‘we all smugly walk away after looking at each other fondly’ kind of heist movie, and more of a The Town, ‘most of these people aren’t making it out of here’ kind of heist movie. Their world starts out cruel and unjust, and it ends that way, too.

And when I say it starts out cruel and unjust, I really mean it. As in, the opening scene concerns Fox’s Frankie working as a bank teller when someone she barely knows from around the way violently robs the bank. Frankie gets an elderly woman’s head splattered across her face, and remains in her blood-stained suit while police question her and then her boss fires her for slightly knowing one of the robbers. It’s viciously unfair, and she tells them so. Then, on her way out the door, she stops in front of one of the officers. This officer, the only other Black woman in the room, has been silently watching everyone malign and abuse Frankie while sipping her glass of water. And Frankie says, “you didn’t even bother to ask me if I was thirsty, sister.”

Everyone else in the room—the asshole cop, the asshole boss—their cruelty is extreme, but it’s kind of expected. The cruelty from this other Black woman, who presumably has some power in the room, feels like a betrayal.

I couldn’t shake that exchange out of my head while watching Reality Check, Netflix’s latest streaming doc (derogatory) about the cultural juggernaut that was America’s Next Top Model.

Before Tyra Banks “went to” Harvard Business School, and before she moved to Australia and launched her hot ice cream venture—before she was mostly punchline, basically—she was a globally famous supermodel. It’s hard to remember just how famous she was, a household name just for being phenomenally beautiful. And in 2003, she parlayed that fame into a globally famous reality show, America’s Next Top Model. Every cycle (normal shows would call this a “season”) brought a dozen or so young women to compete to become America’s next top best friend model. This show taught us about go-sees, and invented the word “smize,” and, most importantly, gave us all permission to both envy and mock beautiful young women.

I was in high school when ANTM premiered, and I was sat for every episode of the first few seasons. Watching this doc made me realize I knew some of these girls’ faces better than the ones of people I actually went to high school with. I can recite the elimination monologue with all of Tyra’s theatrical inflections to this day: “two beautiful girls stand before me, but I only have one photo in my hands. That photo represents the girl who is still in the running to become America’s next top model. I'll only call one name, and the girl that I do not call must immediately return to the house and pack your bags.” I even remember exactly where I was1 and who I was with2 when Tyra flipped over an entirely blank photo and sent two girls home. (We will get to that whole situation later.)

For most of the show, Tyra presented herself as Big Sis. She wanted to teach these girls how to make it in the fashion industry, given them the skills and look that they needed, and give the winner a contract that guaranteed success. She wanted to be inclusive, but also pragmatic, dealing out harsh truths about the industry so that they would “learn something from this.” So she said.

Unfortunately, most of those “harsh truths” boiled down to “you need to be skinny” and “you need to smilingly accept every flavour of abuse that comes your way.” She and the judges would bully the contestants in insidious ways, and then eliminate them for sometimes capricious reasons. Every single girl who I saw complain about sexual harassment was told that she needed to handle it better, which is to say, not say anything to anyone at any time. Same with the girls who dealt with racist harassment, the exact kind that Tyra consistently says she faced on her way up.

The thing is, I truly believe that Tyra truly believed she had the best intentions with this show. I also believe she is, by necessity, incapable of genuine self-reflection. She is supremely self-conscious while also being staggeringly un-self-aware. All ego, no introspection. Dressing like Inspector Gadget but she can’t find a clue.

There’s also the way she described the makeover process in the documentary: “when you see this beautiful specimen, you see this beautiful little fawn, and then you put her through this process and then she turns into this princess, it also shows possibility.” She fully internalized the fashion industry’s eye. She didn’t see these girls as human beings. She saw them as commodities, for the most part; and projections of herself, for the unlucky few. Designing a whole show around that mindset made it so that, as Cycle 1 contestant Ebony Haith put it, “they forgot the danger” that they were exposing these girls to. And, as in every other aspect of society, the danger was most severe for the Black girls.

Danielle Evans (Cycle 6) was one of my favourite contestants in all of ANTM. I loved her accent, and her gap tooth, and her sunny confidence. The fact that Tyra and the judges kept attacking the gap tooth always struck me as weird3, because gap teeth are obviously cute and lots of known sex symbols rock them.

But Danielle and fellow finalist Joanie Dodds were paired together for dental surgery to be a second part of their big makeovers. Joanie, whom I also adored, had a snaggletooth that she had learned to hide when she smiled. This tooth was something Joanie was insecure about and couldn’t afford to fix on her own. So for Joanie, this was a tremendous gift that she still appreciates, even at the cost of her extremely painful surgery happening on national television. But for Danielle, who had insisted from day one that “this gap is stayin, sucka,” her surgery was a massive humiliation, invasion, and theft of her autonomy.

Maybe all of that seemed worth it in the moment that Danielle won Cycle 6. She let Tyra change her body, in exchange for a modeling career. Until, of course, the limitations of the modeling career that Tyra gave her became clear. Until she learned that being associated with Tyra’s show would prevent her from having the career she went on Tyra’s show to win.

According to Danielle, Tyra phoned her up nearly two decades later and admitted to knowing that Danielle was struggling, and doing nothing about it. “I always rode the fence with you,” Tyra said to her.

You didn’t even bother to ask me if I was thirsty, sister.

Tiffany Richardson (Cycle 4) was at the center of the most infamous moment in ANTM history. The “we were rooting for you, we were all rooting for you” moment, which came mere seconds after Tyra revealed a blank photo to send two girls home.

The buzz on Tiffany is that she had auditioned for an earlier cycle, but was disqualified for getting in a fight. Behind the scenes and between cycles, Tyra and the ANTM team sent Tiffany to anger management coaching so that they could bring her back on the show. When she did return, things generally seemed to be following the comeback kid narrative that Tyra so clearly wanted. Tiffany seemed to be the latest contestant who Tyra projected herself onto, someone whose physical beauty and inner strength could lift her out of her difficult socioeconomic situation.

Until this teleprompter challenge, chile. Tyra had a teleprompter set with a Fashion Week fashion correspondent blurb, with a lot of designer names (Christian LaCroix, Issey Miyake) and colours (magenta, chartreuse) chosen specifically to trip the girls up. Reading a teleprompter is legitimately difficult, and this was a transparent stitch-up to humble these teenagers and make them feel stupid. Mean Girl judge Janice Dickinson, as usual, got right to the point—“none of you girls can read!”

Tiffany crashed out harder than anyone, breaking down into tears, and ultimately walking out of the room saying “this is humiliating. More and more each week.” It was that walk-off that got her eliminated, which is still within the bounds of “fair.” Like, vocally not wanting to be part of a competition is perfectly reasonable grounds for elimination.

There is nothing fair or reasonable about what followed, though. The two eliminated contestants went to hug everyone else goodbye, and Tiffany did a normal human thing—she laughed, and joked with her friends, and told them not to cry. And this display of insufficient devastation triggered Tyra, who quite plainly felt personally disrespected by Tiffany’s attempts to laugh through her pain.

Free from context, Tyra screaming “we were all rooting for you, how DARE you!” has become something of a campy, jokey catchphrase. But to the people in the room, and especially to Tiffany, this outburst was shocking.

In 2026, Tyra’s explanation is all deflection. And again, I’m sure that she believes herself when she says all of this. But it doesn’t change the fact that, in a moment where literally nothing was at stake for her but her own ego, she dropped the benevolent den mother act and unleashed such vicious unkindness towards the most vulnerable person in the room that lawyers had to get involved.

That her excuse boils down to her own racial trauma as a Black woman is so disingenuous that I feel genuinely disgusted by it. Because the lesson she learned was not to do better herself, or to use her power to protect other Black girls so that they didn’t face the same racist or classist discrimination that she did. The lesson she learned was to use her power to make or—much more likely—break as many girls as she could. She didn’t want to change an oppressive system, she just wanted license to oppress.

Of the women in Reality Check, none of the ones who say that the show changed their life for the better are Black. None of the Black women have particularly fond things to say about the experience, or about Tyra. They mostly feel exploited, with an extra layer of disappointment because Tyra was supposed to be different. She specifically said she was different, at least early on. But she turned out to be just as bad as the rest of the industry, and gave these girls very little that would actually prepare them for said industry. It’s hard to draw any conclusions other than that they would have been better off without America’s Next Top Model altogether.

I’m not here to let anyone else off the hook. Janice Dickinson was a villain for the ages, and said everything bluntly that Tyra Banks would try to euphemize. Miss J, Mr. Jay, and noted fashion photographer Nigel Barker were all bullies as well, deputized by the head bully in charge. I’m not on board with their redemption tour at all, especially not when Nigel Barker watched footage of himself in 4K blaming a teenager for not handling sexual harassment in the right way, and then doubled right on down. But these people were all henchmen, first of all. And second of all, the fashion industry’s cruelty is kind of expected. But just like with Frankie and the Black female cop in Set It Off, the cruelty coming from a Black woman with all the power in the room, who called herself trying to change the industry, really does feel like a betrayal.