Alright, I’ll admit it…
No “OC” on TV last night. In its place was “The Swan,” which was 37 minutes of bad TV surrounding seven minutes of what can make reality TV so gripping.
I’m talking, of course, about what they refer to as “The Reveal,” where the woman who has just gone through three months of dieting, exercise, and intense plastic surgery finally gets to see herself in a mirror.
Now, despite the producers of this show dumping (reportedly) up to $250k into these women (in surgery and expert guidance), it’s not like they’re taking the ugliest women in the world and turning them into Cindy Crawford. Apparently, that’s not possible.
What did make this show so gripping though was that the back stories on these women made it perfectly clear that each had a severe case of low self-esteem. Both (I think) had long time boyfriends/husbands, and in one case the husband said he thinks they may have been intimate seven or eight times over three years.
Yeah, that’s bad body image.
Anyway, “The Reveal” was set up with the same sort of reality TV ham handed schlock that I think Mark Walberg should have patented about six years ago. But once the curtain was pulled back from the mirror and these women got to see themselves redone for the first time, it was a really powerful moment.
Where I think this show misses the mark is in the ultimate goal, which is for these women to “make the pageant.” Two women per show are redone, and only one gets to compete in the pageant, ostensibly for big money and/or prizes.
I think it’d be far more interesting to follow both of these women back home with cameras. Not for the “welcome home” party that some of those makeover shows have, but more to deal with how this transformation affects the relationship they have with their husbands. While you’d always hope for the story that brings them closer together and deeper in love, I think that some of these women with their new found self-esteem could come home, realize they could do better, and slowly start to disintegrate their relationships. When you take a solid “5” and turn her into a “7.5” (which is about what happened in both cases last night), suddenly the husband who’s about a “6” is now married out of his league.
That’s where this would get interesting. Who gives a rat’s ass about the pageant? Let’s watch the men in their lives get insecure because they’re now married to a more beautiful woman than they have any right to be.
My recommendation for “The Swan?” Watch it from between :35 minutes after the hour and :45 minutes after the hour. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.