The show had lost almost a million viewers between Cycles 17 and 18, prompting the overhaul. “When ratings dip despite your most valiant efforts to chase them, maybe it’s time to look under the weave for your show’s perfectly nice, apple pie roots,” Lucy Stehlik wrote on in 2013. At the time, fans mourned the changing of the guard, lamenting that Tyra had driven the show off the rails. Alexander-replacing them with PR experts and Twitter personalities.
Beginning in Cycle 19, the show fired its regular judges and mentor figures-the photographer Nigel Barker, the photoshoot director Jay Manuel, and the runway coach J. Cycle 20, in 2013, only had 1.7 million viewers.ĪNTM’s ratings drop has coincided with other logistical changes for the reality-TV juggernaut.
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The series held relatively stable at about 5 million viewers for seasons one through nine, but ratings have steadily tanked since.
ANTM may have achieved immortality, but that doesn’t mean the show has aged well. Upon the premiere of the show’s 20th cycle in 2013, the Glamour blogger Phoebe Robinson added ANTM to “ cockroaches and Cher” as the things that would survive after the apocalypse. On the other it detracts from the fun, insular fantasy world ANTM worked so hard to create.Įven in its new incarnation, ANTM is huge today: It airs in over 150 countries and has spawned more than 40 international spinoffs, in countries from Australia to Cambodia. On the one hand, this departure mirrors a realistic shift that’s taken place in an industry that increasingly rewards familiar faces with built-in fanbases. But gone are the camp and self-awareness that once characterized the show-now, it’s a hashtag-heavy, emoji-laden battle of the brands. The prize still includes a modeling contract with an agency (for Cycle 22, it’s NEXT Model Management) and a spread in a fashion magazine (now Nylon, rather than Vogue Italia). In short, ANTM went from an industry competition to a branding pageant-from a more straightforward contest that promised the winner a modeling career to one that promised the winner a large Internet following. And to top it all off, in the past few seasons the show has invited its avid fans to help decide the champion using social media, by voting for their favorite shoots via Facebook likes. The judging structure has become transparent, with panelists putting up their scores like Olympic judges rating figure skaters. While drama has always been been part of the show’s DNA, it’s been amped up exponentially. Each season has a theme (“British Invasion,” “College”), so the competition isn’t just about who’s the best model, it’s about who best captures a certain type.
Cycle 22, which premieres on August 5, features, for the third time in a row, women and men. For better and for worse, these are the scandals that rocked the ANTM fandom.Market-Speak Is the Love Language on Succession Megan Garberīut things have changed-there hasn’t been a “normal” cycle of ANTM since Cycle 16. As one contestant famously said, "This is not America's Next Top Best Friend," and we wouldn't have it any other way. However, the show surprisingly has a dark side. Mainly, it's given us the fierce ability to smize in our Instagram selfies and the intimate knowledge of what makes a tabloid-worthy scandal. But in the meantime, we are left with the longstanding lessons the series has taught us. Though it's still up in the air, as of this writing, ANTM may very well continue on to Cycle 25. The star once revealed to PeopleTV's Couch Surfing (via Entertainment Weekly) that she initially believed the series would only last just two seasons. Long from now, aliens discovering our human archives will probably still be subjected to GIFs of creator Tyra Banks screaming, "We were all rooting for you!" Airing in hundreds of countries, the show has accumulated dozens of international spin-offs, and, at the time of this writing, has spanned 24 seasons - much to the shock of Banks. A decade after its 2003 launch, Glamour blogger Phoebe Robinson claimed the "seemingly immortal" series would withstand the apocalypse alongside "cockroaches and Cher" - and that might actually be true.
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America's Next Top Model is certainly in the running for TV's longest-standing reality TV show, not unlike other staples like The Bachelor, American Idol, and Survivor.