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The Swan Director Erin Lee Carr on Reality TV’s Cruelest Makeover

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SEP 29, 2026 at 11:28 PM EDT

In 2004, thousands of women applied for a Fox reality show that promised to turn "ugly ducklings" into beauties. It was called The Swan. Contestants spent three months cut off from friends and family while undergoing cosmetic surgery and intense fitness regimens, and most had no idea a beauty pageant was waiting at the end. 

Now director Erin Lee Carr (Britney vs Spears, Mommy Dead and Dearest) revisits the show in the new Hulu documentary The Swan: Behind the Mirror. She joins H. Alan Scott on Newsweek's Parting Shot podcast to talk about what the show did to the women who lived it, the prizes that came with a tax bill and why she calls the women "patient zero for the internet's appetite to tear [people] apart." 

Carr also reckons with her own hypocrisy, the audience's role in the judgment and how Ozempic and today's reality TV prove The Swan never really went away. Plus, the answer every woman gave to her final interview question: Would you do it again? 

"We live in the world that The Swan built, in ways that we like to have outrage about and then comply with," Carr said.

The Swan: Behind the Mirror is streaming now on Hulu. 

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