America’s Next Top Model and the Death of Work-Life Balance
Intro to Television, Fall 2023
Television’s role in shaping culture and popular ideas is contentious, having become even more so with the advent of reality shows. America’s Next Top Model, perhaps one of the genre’s best-known programs, initially aired on UPN before moving to The CW for the majority of its run. The CW’s reputation for teen soaps suggests that ANTM was meant for viewers of its other programming—teenage and young adult women. “America’s Next Top Model: Neoliberal Labor,” an essay by Laurie Ouellette, reads the program as teaching its viewers how to succeed in the post-industrial workforce. This is apparent in episode 7 of the show’s fourth “cycle,” or season. “The Girl Who Pushes Tyra Over the Edge” sees the contestants asked to demonstrate a range of performance skills, where discontentment or failure to meet host Tyra Banks’s standards is met with harsh criticism. The episode’s implicit message conflates moral strength with professional success, suggesting that opportunities will come to the girl that happily complies with the conditions of her employment.
The cutthroat modeling world depicted in ANTM mirrors the increasingly unstable workforce viewers are preparing for. In a capitalist system that centers individual achievement and responsibility, the onus of employment falls on the workers rather than those who hire them. This is especially true in the gig economy, where workers strive for the skills that will make them competitive applicants at job after job. Citing the research of Richard Sennett, Ouellette says, “workers across industries are increasingly required to migrate from ‘task to task, job to job, place to place,’ while retraining frequently and developing new abilities to compensate for diminished returns on fixed skill sets. The ideal worker today must also be able to switch gears at a moment’s notice and mobilize a ‘self-consuming passion’ to keep themselves mobile within the labor force.” ANTM models are evaluated on their “versatility”—their willingness to take whatever the show throws at them with grace, no matter how humiliating or violating it might be. The contestants that receive the most praise demonstrate the most “self-consuming passion” among their peers, unburdened by long-held insecurities, personal problems, or commitments outside of the job. Many adults today, not financially comfortable in their careers, are encouraged to dedicate a greater portion of life to their job. By bringing projects home or teaching themselves marketable skills, they hope to reap the promised benefits of hard work.
Post-industrial jobs tend to blur the boundaries between work and personal life: “While the factory worker has a scheduled shift followed by a period of leisure…ANTM contestants are expected to practice body maintenance, social networking, and other value-generating activities learned on the show during their ‘off hours,’ thereby participating in constructing modeling as less a contained job than a ‘way of life.’” On this episode, the models spend their free time discussing the ins and outs of the competition and memorizing a scene in an unfamiliar dialect. Tiffany, whose low-income background has been sensationalized, is looked down upon for napping on the couch while the other girls try to decipher the riddle Tyra has given them about the next day’s photoshoot. The contestants are pushed to embody the ideal model on levels both physical and personal: whether they’re fit for the job is not just about their performance on runways and in photoshoots, but how they respond to the accompanying lifestyle.
Categorically, reality television presents itself as depicting real people, even when they’re placed in unusual circumstances. On ANTM, Tyra Banks speaks frankly about how the show’s format simulates the “real world” of the fashion industry. A young viewer might be apt to believe that ANTM is a more honest depiction of working in fashion than, say, sitcoms like Ugly Betty. In this show, bosses cruelly insulting employees, firing someone as a wake-up call to their colleagues, and surprising employees with tasks largely unrelated to their jobs are all presented as normal and accepted within the established hierarchy. Ouellette claims, “Television ‘smuggles past’ these intolerable conditions by translating the harshest realities of work into playful renditions of extended work time, declining job security, and the ‘deep acting of passion,’ so that we are more apt to accept these conditions without question. In this sense, television performs ‘ideological work’ in the lives and minds of audiences.” A show claiming to honestly represent the workplace can have a very real impact on the socialization of its viewers, who learn what’s acceptable in different situations in part from media portrayals of them. Even the ceremonial elements of competitive reality TV, those that don’t translate to the real world, confer great value on the achievements of those who outperform their peers. The resulting connotations stay with audiences long after a show is over.
America’s Next Top Model is emblematic of 21st century attitudes towards career pursuits, where a high-status job can become the foremost part of someone’s identity. While reflecting the conditions of its creation, the program also distorts reality enough to form young viewers’ beliefs about what to expect in the workplace. As one of its network’s most popular and longest-running programs, its cultural impact can only be estimated. Attempts to interpret its meaning, however, are ceaselessly fascinating.
Works Cited
Mittell, Jason, and Laurie Ouellette. “America’s Next Top Model: Neoliberal Labor.” Essay. In How to Watch Television, 168–76. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2020.
