It was in 2003, while listening to country radio, that Kelly first heard the casting call: “Have you dreamed about plastic surgery but never thought you could afford it?” She immediately turned up the volume. The pitch sounded too good to be true: free cosmetic procedures, a nutritionist, self-esteem work – one “life-changing opportunity” that “could transform everything”. Kristy, Cindy, Tawnya and Beth heard the call, too: the chance to overhaul oneself from the outside in, fulfilling the implicit but omnipresent promise that if you just lost a little weight and just tweaked your face a bit, your whole life would open up. You, too, could be an ugly duckling transfigured into a swan.
The catch? It would all be filmed for television, of course, for a short-lived show that some have called one of the most sadistic of all time: The Swan. The Fox reality program, which ran for two seasons in 2004, brought the spectacle of intensive plastic surgery – the endurance of extreme pain and humiliation in pursuit of a narrow beauty ideal – to US living rooms with shocking bluntness: bandages and bruises, surgical cannulas pounding into flesh, curt assessments of lumps and bumps and “masculine” teeth that must be corrected in pursuit of a better you. Even among similarly thin-obsessed programs from the infamously ruthless wild west of early reality television – America’s Next Top Model and The Biggest Loser, to name a few – The Swan stands out as especially cruel, at once hopelessly bought into punitive beauty standards on-screen and shamelessly manipulative off it.
It’s the “XXL version” of the many issues endemic to reality television, said Erin Lee Carr, the director of The Swan: Behind the Mirror, a new Hulu retrospective on the infamous series. “Unconscious people, secret pageants, sunk-cost principle, people having to leave, teeth coming out even if you might not need it” – if there were ever a reality series deserving of a second critical look, it would be The Swan.
The show, developed by former Telemundo executive and “life coach” Nely Galán, was in some ways a natural, if extreme, outgrowth of growing fascination with, and exposure to, celebrities under a tightening microscope. Carr, the director of 2021 Netflix film Britney vs Spears, is somewhat of an expert on the aughts’ relentless pressure on women to stay tight, taut and sexual. An early montage rips through a horrifying array of the period’s worst impulses: Lindsay Lohan’s figure analyzed on the evening news, celebrities hospitalized for “exhaustion”, Anna Nicole Smith bragging about diet pills on a late-show couch.
But the 100-minute film is less an examination of the extreme diet culture that begat something like The Swan – for many, we know it all too well – than a more truthful accounting of what the 32 women who went on the show endured. As numerous contestants and a handful of producers reveal, very little of what was shown on TV in 2004 was accurate or truthful, beyond the physical pain and discomfort of its contestants. (Galán, the show’s creator, on-screen judge and off-screen “mentor”, declined to participate.) As several attest, the initial appeal of the series was, yes, possibly some “free boobs”, but also a genuine chance to improve their self-esteem through fitness, therapy and scarce personal time. “I was juggling it all, taking care of my family financially,” says Beth, a first season participant, in the film. “I was dealing with a lot of emotional baggage at the time, and I needed a change.”
The reality was, of course, more complicated and less altruistic. While “the original concept of The Swan, as it was told to me, was transforming women’s lives”, a producer named Julee recalls, the entertainment dictates of reality TV (as another producer put it: “we’re gonna take ugly chicks and make them hot”) demanded otherwise. Contestants were isolated from friends, family and themselves – there were no mirrors present for the duration of filming – lest they gain any outside perspective. Nurses or other caretakers were so infrequent the women resorted to changing each other’s bandages, preparing each other’s liquid foods or helping to clean up when, say, one’s lipo continuously leaked on the bed.
The women maintained their own scrapbooks and calendars, and agreed to a series of rules familiar to any diet culture survivor’s delusional plan for total metamorphosis: “I am solely responsible for ensuring my time here is a success; I will not see my family or friends; I will follow the plan provided by the swan team of experts; I will go to therapy once a week; I will stick to a strict diet; I will work out six days a week sometimes twice a day; I will work with the swan coach to stay motivated; and I will not see myself in a mirror so I can focus on my internal transformation.”
The women were given little choice in what procedures they had done – everything from rhinoplasties to breast augmentation to veneers, as many as six surgeries in 10 hours of anesthesia. Cameras rolled as they woke up from surgery, still groggy from anesthesia, swollen and heavily bandaged. (That is, if they woke up – one second-season contestant whose oxygen levels plummeted after surgery, ending filming, says she still does not know if she underwent chest compressions to survive.) Such grotesque footage, which Carr used judiciously, “hurt my heart, on a human level”, she said. “I don’t think anybody that is coming off of anesthesia who barely knows that they’re conscious could consent to being filmed.”
There was virtually no recovery time; within days, the women were required to be in the gym, berated as their post-procedure faces burned, on a strict diet of no more than 1,200 calories a day; by the second season, that allowance was halved, putting the participants in a dangerous and unsustainable calorie deficit. “I think they had to dehumanize us because, ultimately, we were just a job,” says Beth, next to old footage of her giving a thumbs up while completely obscured by medical bandages.
Perhaps most egregiously – at least, according to the participants – the women were not informed until post-surgery that there would be a pageant, including a lingerie portion and swimsuit competition, that would pit the women against each other. Or, as the show more bluntly put it to viewers, “two average-looking women” face off to survive another week as The Swan.
“I don’t think the pageant was ever a part of the original format. I think it was a discussion at Fox that was: ‘What’s the craziest thing we could cook up?’” Carr said, reflecting on the shift from “life transformation” show to post-surgery onstage parade. “It felt like everybody was flinging things at the wall to see how they could get people to react.” As Dr Randal Haworth, one of the show’s designated plastic surgeons, put it when selecting the best candidates for the most intensive surgeries: “you want to see drama”.
Even in an era saturated with fatphobia, fad diets and laxatives, The Swan engendered intense backlash as a new low for reality TV. Its staying power was limited – while the first season premiered to 10 million people, making it America’s self-proclaimed “No 1 makeover show” – viewership fell off precipitously in the second season, which killed the show before it could even see 2005. But it lives on as “a harbinger of what’s to come for our future – in terms of thinness, mental health and basically trying to evaporate”, said Carr. Much of what was said on the show – that physical beauty is power worth sacrificing for, that a few nips and tucks will change your life, that plastic surgery is a form of psychiatry practiced by “interior designers” of the body – has been recycled into our present plastic surgery nightmare of procedures ever more invisible, insidious and extreme, though in sleeker, more humanist-sounding terms. What is the assertion from many an influencer that being thinner just ups your quality of life, if not “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” by another name? Now, as then, “everyone is quite sadistic when it comes to other people’s looks,” said Carr. “And everybody forgets that the other person is a human being.”
Given all that, it is perhaps surprising that almost all of the women say they do not regret participating in The Swan – if only to meet each other. The film ends with “the flock” gathering for a long-overdue reunion that Carr called “one of the greatest days of my life”.
“The healing and the joy that comes from a group of women understanding each other is profound,” she said. “You don’t have to change the way you look for somebody else to think you’re beautiful.”
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The Swan: Behind The Mirror is streaming now on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ in the UK and Australia
