In a new documentary, film-maker Erin Lee Carr lifts the lid on the 2000s TV show that shocked AmericaIt 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. Continue reading...