Maybe it was naïve of me to hope that Netflix’s much-anticipated, buzzed-about television exposé, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, was going to be a revelatory, definitive moral rebuke. Tempers about ANTM have flared up every few years since the show went off the air—a few shocking clips and a think-piece or two occasionally burbling back up into the social news cycle—but for some reason I thought that the most recent reconsideration of the series, which was particularly heated, might finally be the one in which hand-wringing revisitation actually gave way to something like reckoning. 

Though, I don’t really know what that would have looked like. I didn’t think that Banks—the host, producer, and co-creator of one of TV’s most dreadfully enduring reality circuses—would be dragged into the town square for punishment at the end of her interview. But I did wonder if maybe there would be a crucial confrontation, a receiving of real and lasting grievances, and maybe some atonement on the part of the people who pulled the show’s strings. 

But, the three-episode Netflix doc is, instead, an oral history that’s as much weirdly nostalgic as it is damning. We have talking heads like Jay Manuel, Jay Alexander, and Nigel Barker—all former ANTM judges and mentors—speaking about personal woes and professional hurt over how they were treated by Banks and company. But they also reflect with a sincere fondness on the madness of the show’s ascendancy: throngs of auditioners clogging city streets, adoring fans accosting them the world over, all the happy mania of a hit, zeitgeist-capturing show. They are recalling something wonderful that happened to them with rather flippant regard to the terrible things that happened to the people who really turned the gears of that success. “Poor girl,” Manuel says about a contestant, Shandi, who was arguably sexually assaulted on the show, while Alexander flashes humorous looks in reaction to traumatizing challenges some of the contestants were made to endure. 

They really only get serious when it comes to their own negative experiences on the show, mostly having to do with the cruel or controlling ways Banks treated them. Manuel, for his part, says he tried to quit ANTM when he felt it was turning into something ugly, but he ultimately did stay, and thus mostly seems upset about how he was ignored by Banks when he returned. Throughout, Barker (sad about his faded epoch), Manuel (sad about losing his friendship with Banks), and Alexander (dealing with a legitimate life crisis that exists well beyond the scope of America’s Next Top Model), act as if they were mostly passive observers of their phenomenon, with very little power to influence its direction. 

That very well may have been true from a contract, corporate hierarchy standpoint. But they certainly were empowered to walk away if they wanted to, even if it made Banks angry. They weren’t psychically and financially as stuck as many of the contestants were, plenty of whom speak on camera in Reality Check about how a dream of escaping a difficult life back home led them to accept a lot of mistreatment while, largely because many promises (impossible ones, it turns out) had been made about the show’s potential to better their lives. Shandi Sullivan, Ebony Haith, Tiffany Richardson, Dani Evans, Joanie Dodds, and other notable cast members speak candidly about the damage they suffered during and after the show, recalling with amazement what was done to them and, in some cases, what they agreed to do. 

I wanted even more of those voices, to further complicate and perhaps contradict the almost giddy testimony of the people who profited off of ANTM in a much more significant way. The calibration and editing rhythms of Reality Check often make contestants and judges seem almost like mutuals, all caught up in a wild thing they were equally at the mercy of. The power differential between the non-Tyra judges and the contestants is sanded down to almost nothing. That approach doesn’t fairly distinguish the gravity of the contestants’ ordeals, and lets some people who got rich making the show walk away with a kind of impunity. 

Co-creator and producer Ken Mok accepts slightly more agency than do the judges, but he’s nonetheless evasive about his culpability in all of this, while unselfconsciously expressing amazement about the success story he helped engineer. He passes the buck in new interviews, and in clips from old press appearances is shown callously reveling in the strife of many contestants. I suppose he is just honestly expressing the philosophy of most reality producers, but he seems to not realize just how severe the backlash to his series has been. He speaks dispassionately about most of the troubling ANTM artifacts brought before him; of the Shandi’s alcohol-fueled incident in Milan, he essentially says, Well, we edited a lot of even worse stuff out. 

Though Mok never says it out loud, he does seem aware that the Reality Check cameras aren’t really there for him—or, at least, that he’s not where their attack is ultimately aimed. The Jays and Nigel seem to grok that too, as do we in the audience: the true target here is Banks, who sat down for a lengthy interview that feels entirely siloed off from everyone else’s recollections. Perhaps directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan have let the other judges talk their way out of responsibility as part of their plea deals; in exchange, they’ll serve as witnesses for the prosecution against Tyra Banks.