America's Next Top Model
Tyra Banks turned the fashion industry into a weekly elimination bloodsport: makeover meltdowns, impossible photo shoots, and a panel that could end a dream with one photograph. And in 2005 it produced the eruption that outlived the whole series — "we were all rooting for you!"
Created by supermodel Tyra Banks, who developed the format with producer Ken Mok, America's Next Top Model premiered on UPN in May 2003 with a simple engine: a house full of aspiring models, a weekly photo shoot, and a judging panel that eliminated one hopeful per episode. Banks hosted, judged, and executive-produced, doling out modeling wisdom between challenges that ranged from runway walks to underwater shoots. When UPN and The WB merged in 2006, the show moved to the new CW network — where it became the network's highest-rated show from 2007 to 2010.
The series' most famous moment arrived in cycle 4, in 2005, when contestant Tiffany Richardson reacted to her elimination with what Banks read as a joking shrug. Banks exploded — "we were all rooting for you!" — in an outburst that became one of the most famous moments in the series' history and, years later, an inexhaustible meme. Banks herself eventually said she regretted it, telling BuzzFeed News, "Oh my god totally, I wouldn't have done it."
Top Model was more than one meltdown, though. It ran 24 cycles and 315 episodes across three networks before ending in April 2018, spawned more than fifty international versions, and its blueprint — a celebrity insider hosting a panel-judged elimination competition in a glamorous industry — echoed through later shows, including RuPaul's Drag Race. For anyone who was near a TV in the mid-2000s, it was appointment viewing: the makeovers (someone always cried), the photo-shoot disasters, and Tyra pulling that week's winning picture from an envelope while the bottom two held hands and trembled.
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