The Illusion of ‘America’s Next Top Model’
Slate Money
Slate Podcasts
4.1 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this Money Talks: Journalist Bridget Armstrong joins Emily Peck to discuss this moment of reckoning for the iconic reality show America’s Next Top Model and what she learned in reporting for her podcast Curse of: America’s Next Top Model. They explore how Top Model’s central promise—a fast track to a career in the fashion industry—was ultimately an illusion used to make great television at the expense of the contestants.
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Podcast production by Jessamine Molli.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This ad-free podcast is part of your Slate Plus membership. |
| 0:13.6 | Hello and welcome to Money Talks, a special extra podcast from Slate Money, where we chat with brilliant and interesting people. |
| 0:20.5 | I'm Emily Peck. I'm a writer at Axios and co-host of Slate Money, where we chat with brilliant and interesting people. I'm Emily Peck. |
| 0:21.4 | I'm a writer at Axios and co-host of Slate Money, and I'm here today with Bridget Armstrong. |
| 0:27.0 | She's an audio journalist and a senior producer and host of the podcast, Curse of America's |
| 0:32.3 | Next Top Model. It is an amazing reassessment of one of the most popular reality TV shows of all time, I think, |
| 0:41.4 | and definitely of the 2000s. |
| 0:43.6 | So far, 24 seasons ended in 2018. |
| 0:47.9 | That's now going through this sort of reassessment. |
| 0:51.7 | I don't know what you would call it. |
| 0:53.3 | But we'll get into all of it. Welcome, Bridget. |
| 0:55.6 | Hi, Emily. Thanks for having me. I'm so glad you're here. I wanted to talk to you because, I guess I should |
| 1:00.3 | say right off the bat that I didn't watch America's Next Top Model. I was aware of it. I knew about |
| 1:06.5 | smizing, which is Tara Banks' word for smiling with your eyes, which I tried to do this morning for my |
| 1:12.9 | husband and then just started laughing because I can't do it. Don't feel bad. I watched 24 seasons |
| 1:17.3 | and I still can't do it. I'm going to practice. It's a really hard thing. I guess that's why |
| 1:21.5 | models do it. Not podcasters. Anyway, so I wanted to talk to you because there's this new Netflix documentary out now called |
| 1:30.0 | Reality Check that's been really popular that I watched and then thought, oh, it would be really |
| 1:34.6 | interesting to talk about the business of reality TV show through this lens of America's |
| 1:39.8 | next top model, all the ways that it sort of promised these very young women entry into the modeling |
| 1:47.6 | world and a career in modeling, and all the ways that let them down, and all the things you |
| 1:52.5 | expose on your podcast about the contracts used in the industry, about how the producers |
... |
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