The Swan: Behind the Mirror, Credit: Hulu
Halfway through the new Hulu documentary The Swan: Behind the Mirror, a group of women on a supervised grocery run distract their handler, pull a magazine off the rack at checkout and squeal. They're in it. A before and after, spread across four pages, for all of America to judge. I know those pages well. I put them there.
I sat down this week to review Erin Lee Carr's film expecting to do what I've done for 30 years: sit in judgment of other people's television shows. 22 years after Fox turned 16 so-called ugly ducklings into a primetime makeover pageant, a dozen of the women finally get their say about the surgeries and the relentless push for more tears. What I didn't expect was a cameo. It lasts a matter of seconds, and I'm not named. So consider this a review with a confession attached: what the film reveals about how far TV was willing to go, and how far I helped it go.
First, the show. The Swan was Fox's 2004 "makeover pageant," created by former Telemundo executive Nely Galán. 16 women, picked from more than 250,000 applicants, spent 90 days on plastic surgery, dentistry, twice-daily workouts and a crash diet. "I just wanted to walk into a room and feel pretty," Kristy Garza says in the film. That was the deal on offer. The price was everything else.
They weren't allowed to see family or friends. In a rented apartment complex in Marina del Rey, every mirror was covered. Every reflective surface, in fact, right down to the CDs, which producers confiscated (in case a contestant caught her reflection in the back of a Dido album). They called it "Pretty Prison."
