Premiered in 2000, Ridley’s Scott’s Gladiator seems to have presaged the competition shows that soon flooded television in the arenas of singing, survival on an island, fashion design, high-end cooking, weight loss, and more. One of the first of these was America’s Next Top Model, created by Tyra Banks, developed by Ken Mok and Kenya Barris, and launched in 2003. Banks, who began modeling at 15, was always an outside-the-box talent, gifted with wit, drive, and a desire to change the industry’s narrow standard of beauty. Her idea? “I wanna marry American Idol and The Real World and set it in the modeling industry.” Each season began with 10 to 16 contestants—young women from big cities and small towns, inexperienced, often uneducated, but photogenic and full of dreams. They all dormed in one big apartment with cameras rolling (if you’ve ever lived in a sorority house you know what to expect). Every week brought a new challenge and another elimination. The show was a massive hit, not least because of the creatives who shepherded the girls through their trials: Jay Manuel, Nigel Barker, and J. Alexander. But the suits always want more, the public is fickle, and times change. As the show cycled into its final years (it ended in 2018), the challenges got increasingly dangerous and sometimes dark. Directed by Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, the three-part documentary Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, interviews all the main players, including Banks, and many of the young aspirants, now older, wiser, and sadly aware that the show’s success was always more important than they were. —Laura Jacobs