Banks's television career began on the fourth season of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, in which she played lead character Will Smith's old friend Jackie Ames. She made seven appearances in the series. Other TV credits include Felicity, MADtv, Nick Cannon's Wild 'n Out (in which she was featured as a special guest host and team captain) and The Price Is Right (guest-starring as a "Barker's Beauty"). She also appeared as a guest in the animated talk show Space Ghost Coast to Coast in an episode entitled "Chinatown."

Tyra Banks has also started her own production company Bankable Productions, which produced The Tyra Banks Show, America's Next Top Model, and the 2008 movie The Clique.

Currently^[when?], Banks can be seen on television as the hostess, judge and executive producer of The CW Television Network show America's Next Top Model. In addition, she hosted The Tyra Banks Show, a daytime talk show aimed at younger women, which premiered on September 12, 2005, and ran until May 28, 2010. The show featured stories about everyday people mixed in with celebrity interviews. Under the slogan "Every woman has a story...and it happened to Tyra too," Banks promoted her show using emotional flashbacks to her own childhood and adolescence. Many of the episodes deal with issues facing women today. Banks and other experts give women advice on fashion, relationships and more. The first two seasons of the show were recorded in Banks' hometown of Los Angeles but, beginning with the fall 2007 season, the show moved to New York City.^{[citation needed]}

In 2008, Banks won the Daytime Emmy Award for her work and production on The Tyra Banks Show.^{[citation needed]}

In late-January 2008, Banks got the go-ahead from The CW Television Network to start work on a new reality television series based on fashion magazines called Stylista. The show premiered on October 22, 2008.^{[citation needed]}

Banks's first big screen role came in 1994, when she co-starred in the drama Higher Learning.^[13] She went on to co-star with Lindsay Lohan in the Disney film Life-Size, playing a doll named Eve who comes to life and has to learn how to live in the real world. Other notable roles include Love Stinks (1999), Love & Basketball (2000), Coyote Ugly (2000) and Halloween: Resurrection (2002). She and Miley Cyrus poke fun at the excesses of the Hollywood lifestyle with a battle over a pair of shoes in Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009).

Banks appeared in the fourth episode of the third season of Gossip Girl^[14] playing Ursula Nyquist, a larger-than-life actress who works with Serena.