THE SMALL SCREEN
NEW STREAMING MOVIES AND TV THIS WEEK
‘THE SUPER MODELS’
Even if you didn’t follow fashion, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington were pop culture fixtures and household names throughout the 1990s. No other group of runway and print models since has captured the public’s imagination in quite the same way. Through new interviews and archival footage, the four-part docu-series “The Super Models” on Apple TV+ looks back at their careers. But “The Super Models” is not especially probing, which tends to be the case whenever celebrity subjects are also executive producers. They are interviewed separately, and only briefly do we see them interact in the present. They aren’t asked to be particularly vulnerable or introspective, although Evangelista goes the deepest. The series is less about who these women are beyond the surface, and more a meditation on a certain kind of fame that predates social media and the concept of influencers. It’s fascinating to contemplate what that once looked like and how it worked, compared with today, when so many models are the offspring of famous parents (Crawford’s children included). The series barely touches on body image, and we’re left to assume the women never struggled to conform to the standards acceptable by the fashion world: “We were the physical representations of power,” says Crawford, who oh-so-briefly dips her toe into these waters. “And I think where it gets tricky and hard to talk about is that the implication is that some people don’t fit that — and then they’re made to feel less beautiful.” Campbell minces no words about the racism she experienced, which resulted in less money and fewer jobs. As the ’90s came to an end, so did these models’ dominance, replaced by waify, interchangeable blank-faced models from Eastern bloc countries who were selected for their homogeneous looks. TV-MA. Available on Apple TV+.