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By H. Alan Scott
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The early days of reality television were the Wild West. Regular people across the United States signed up for experiences they had no point of reference for. From castaways on Survivor to aspiring supermodels on America's Next Top Model, thousands auditioned to be part of something brand new. And in 2004, thousands of women applied for a Fox show that promised to turn "ugly ducklings" into manufactured beauties. It was called The Swan.
Now a new Hulu documentary, The Swan: Behind the Mirror, examines what the show did to the women who lived it. Director Erin Lee Carr, who as a teen viewer "felt fairly ugly on the outside," bought the pitch for the show until the cracks started to show.
"It [The Swan] became what was supposed to be about female empowerment, then moved into this slow-moving car crash of how much can we do to these women," Carr told Newsweek’s Parting Shot podcast. “To subject them to a transformation that we want for them versus of their own choice."
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Carr has made documentaries about Britney Spears and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, but none of them lit up her Instagram DMs like this one.
"It wasn't about celebrity," she said. "It sort of snuck under the skin of everyday teenagers like me and has never left. And do I know the definitive answer as to why? No. My guess? It was so wild that it's hard to believe that it happened."
The Swan lasted just two seasons, both in 2004, but the women who took part still feel it. Over three months, contestants were cut off from friends and family while undergoing intense cosmetic surgery and fitness regimens. The top transformations advanced to a beauty pageant, where one woman was crowned the Swan.
Carr calls the offer "a literal Willy Wonka golden ticket."
"Everything about you that you've ever felt bad about yourself, we're gonna take you away from your circumstances, from your family, from your husband, from anybody who's ever needed you," she said. "It is the first time in your life that we are gonna focus on you."
The catch? Most of them had no idea what was waiting at the end.
"The craziest thing that I found out was when they signed people up for [The Swan], they didn't know about the pageant," Carr said. "They didn't know that they were gonna be competing against their own roommate. So, 'Oh, you're gonna transform my life, you're going to give me a Willy Wonka ticket, amazing, great. Wait, part of that ticket is that I have to get in public in my lingerie that you picked for me?'"
Even the crown came with fine print. Carr said the season 2 winner was handed a haul of prizes, including a necklace billed at $100,000 that was actually worth about $30,000, and was then asked to pay taxes on every item at full sticker value.
"Imagine you win. You won it all, you did it," Carr said. "And then they're like, 'Here's your prizes,' and you can't afford them because you have to pay taxes on it."
The Swan was polarizing from the start. Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, then writing for Entertainment Weekly, called it "a misogynistic mix of TV's twin vices: commercialism and conformity. Like *Queer Eye'*s hip outfits and [Trading] Spaces edgy rooms, Swan churns out women who are preapproved packages of beauty: big breasts, little noses, pearly teeth." Still, the series averaged 9 million viewers a season, a number any show today would kill for.
So was it ever feminist? "The answer is no," Carr said. But making the documentary meant reckoning with how the audience treated the women, too.
"There was so much judgment about why the women participated, and then all of us collectively judged them about their reveal and had they done the work," she said. "So it was about unlearning all that, and then how do I make a documentary that doesn't just re-injure everyone who was exploited in television? It's the thinnest thread to weave."
Those women, she added, "were sort of patient zero for the internet's appetite to tear [people] apart. And they lived with enormous shame, humiliation and regret for a long time."
Fox canceled The Swan, but nothing really changed. From the Kardashians to the Housewives, women getting things pulled and plucked on camera is more popular than ever. A Bravo star who alters her face to keep up with her castmates isn't that different from the middle-class women who applied for The Swan to meet the irrational beauty standards society placed on them.
Carr doesn't exempt herself. "I can't stand to not point out my own hypocrisy," she said, admitting that while she lives in sweatpants, the Instagram love she gets when she's glammed up feels good. "We live in the world that The Swan built, in ways that we like to have outrage about and then comply with."
She calls the show "a harbinger of what's to come," pointing to Ozempic and "the proliferation of plastic surgery, our faces all wanting to look the same."
Have we learned anything since The Swan? Sure, but we haven't necessarily applied it. For every show like The Great British Baking Show that celebrates women as they are, countless others hold them to an impossible standard. And as many of the women in Behind the Mirror know, getting over the impact of the patriarchy is slow and sometimes painful.
That makes Carr's final documentary interview question all the more surprising. She asked every woman if she'd do it again.
"I expected everybody to be like, 'Hell no,' in different tones," Carr said. "And every single interview[ee] said, ‘I would do it again.’"
Why?
"They found each other. They found the people that would help them the rest of their lives," she said. "For one of the first times in their life, they felt special and chosen because it was drilled into their head by Nely [Galán, the show's creator], by producers, by Fox. 'You were picked out of 200,000 women. We chose you.' And what is more uniquely satisfying than feeling chosen? It is the American dream."
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