‘The Swan’ Unmasked: Inside the Most Sadistic Reality Show Ever

The mere mention of “The Swan” is enough to send chills down one’s spine.

Created by former Telemundo exec Nely Galán, the Fox reality series selected 16 female contestants — from over 250,000 applicants — who were so-called “ugly ducklings” and subjected them to a 90-day ordeal of extreme plastic surgery, dentistry, training and crash dieting (with a little bit of therapy thrown in) to transform them into what its panel of “experts” deemed “attractive” before making them compete in “the ultimate beauty pageant,” where the women vied against one another for the ultimate prize of being crowned The Swan.

In a review for Entertainment Weekly, Gillian Flynn, the future author of “Gone Girl,” called it “a foul blend of condescension and self-obsession” and “a misogynistic mix of TV’s twin vices: commercialism and conformity.”

The show’s first season debuted in April 2004 and was a smash hit, attracting 9 million viewers across America. But ratings plummeted in Season 2 amid heavy backlash to the show’s inherent ugliness, and it was canceled. “The Swan” has since ranked atop most lists for the “Worst Reality TV Series in History” and represents the cultural nadir of the image-obsessed early aughts.

Now, the new documentary “The Swan: Behind the Mirror” examines the notorious reality series and the carnival of horrors its participants endured. Directed by Erin Lee Carr (“I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth V. Michelle Carter”) and premiering Sept. 29 on Hulu, the film tackles the show from all angles, including interviews with a dozen former contestants, show producers, trainers, cultural commentators and even one of its plastic surgeons, painting it as an enterprise that preyed on those with self-esteem issues in order to chase ratings.

“They were not looking for people that had their life together,” says Carr. “They were looking for people who were, in my mind, vulnerable, and when you isolate people for 90 days who have already expressed that they have mental health issues, it’s going to go sideways.”

Kristy Garza was interested in “The Swan” because she was exiting the military and ready for a life change. “I’d always struggled with self-esteem issues not because of my ability, but my appearance,” she tells Variety. “I’d always been a tomboy and wanted to feel like the prettiest girl in the room.” Also, after Kristy gave birth she “had cow teats at 23 years old.”

She applied and was accepted for its first season. But things seemed off immediately following her surgeries. “My alarm bells started going off when we got to the apartments in Marina Del Rey and they showed us that all the reflective surfaces were covered,” she recalls. “I’d signed my life away in this contract and you’re already giving me surprises, so what else is going on?”

Indeed, the 16 women on the show were trapped in apartments with no reflective surfaces — even CDs were confiscated by producers — and would have to request permission to leave via their Nextel walkie-talkies. They came to call it “Pretty Prison.” “There were times that I would call on the radio and no one would answer, so you get stir-crazy,” Kristy remembers.

There was no seeing family or friends, contestants were forced to work out six days a week (sometimes twice a day) while recovering from myriad plastic surgeries and had to adhere to a strict diet of 800-1,200 calories a day, courtesy of Jenny Craig. “There were so many of us that didn’t shit for a week,” Kristy shares in the doc.

“The Swan” boasted of shelling out $250,000 on each contestant to cover their cosmetic surgeries, training, dieting and therapy, and producers drilled that sum into their heads throughout the entire process. “We were constantly being told, ‘You can leave, but if you do you’ll owe us for everything we’ve done!’” claims Kristy.

If that weren’t enough, the beauty pageant element of the show wasn’t even revealed to contestants until after their surgeries were performed, while they were in recovery. Carl Buehl, a senior producer on the first season of “The Swan,” says this mandate came down from Fox executives to up the ante, posing the question, “Aren’t you tearing down everything we’ve done for them?”

This curveball felt particularly manipulative to Kristy. “I came in because I have self-esteem issues and now you’re going to make me compare myself to everybody on a national stage while I’m still building myself up?” she exclaims. “I’m super pissed to this day. We were grossly mishandled and disrespected. You can’t invite somebody to play a game with you and then change the rules in the middle of the game. It was bullshit.”

Season 2 was even more exploitive. For its big twist, sisters Kari and Gina Bravata were pitted against each other as contestants — only Gina’s participation was kept secret from Kari. The siblings were given the code names “Mark” and “Greg” so as not to spoil the surprise, and if Gina happened to spill the beans her contract stipulated that she was liable for $5 million plus attorney’s fees. “It was mean and it was cold and it was heartless. I’m still so bitter and so angry,” Kari attests. “I think they ultimately tried to break our bond, which is never going to happen because we’re stronger than them.”

Far and away the most odious talking head in the documentary is Dr. Randal Haworth, one of the show’s two plastic surgeons. “There are no victims in life, only volunteers,” he declares. The women recall Haworth summoning them to a garage where they were pressured to undress and have fully nude photos taken of themselves as rock ‘n’ roll music blared. Though done under the guise of “before and after” plastic surgery photos, Haworth reveals in the film that the nudes were really for a coffee table book he was cooking up that never saw the light of day.

Kari only learned about the coffee table book idea during the making of the doc. “It was a shock and it makes me feel sick,” she asserts. “We were told we had to do it and I remember crying in the middle of it.”

And then she almost died. Since production has never been transparent about exactly what went down during her surgery, Kari has only her blurry memory combined with the accounts of cameramen who were in the operating room documenting it — until they were removed. “From what I’ve heard, they tried to wake me up and take me off anesthesia, pulled the tube out expecting me to wake up, and I didn’t,” Kari recounts. “During me not waking up, my lungs filled with fluid and my oxygen started dropping. It got to a low enough point that all the cameras got icked out, and that’s the extent of what I know happened.”

She shakes her head: “I don’t think I’ll ever know what happened. I would love, for my own medical history, to know the extent of what happened, but I have absolutely no idea.”

While “The Swan: Behind the Mirror” contains loads of access, two key players are noticeably absent: its creator Nely Galán and the show’s chief plastic surgeon, Dr. Terry Dubrow. Carr says she had “many conversations” with Galán about participating in the doc, but her demands — an executive producer credit and a degree of editorial control — proved too much. Since Galán owned the footage to “The Swan,” Carr and her team were forced to get creative, having subjects comment on scenes from the show being played on an iPad so they qualified as fair use. As for Dubrow, Carr says he “wanted a sum of money that would never make sense for a documentarian to pay an expert,” adding it was “under $100,000 for one interview.”

Dubrow, whose name may sound familiar from his role as the husband to “The Real Housewives of Orange County” star Heather Dubrow, opened up about his “The Swan” experience during a recent appearance on the podcast “We Need to Talk With Paul C. Brunson.” According to Dubrow, the show had been approved for a third season that was poised to be even more outrageous than Season 2.

“We’re casting the third season, and because reality TV was really pushing the envelope at the time, we were going to do some crazy casting. We were going to have triplets. And because there were two surgeons, I was going to operate on two, [Haworth] was going to operate on one, and we were going to see how different they looked,” explained a chuckling Dubrow. However, when Peter Ligouri took over as entertainment chairman at Fox, one of his first orders of business was canceling “The Swan.”

A number of ex-“Swan” contestants in the documentary contend that they experienced health complications following the show, from veneers falling out and gum disease — the show’s resident dentist, Dr. Sherri Worth, had her license revoked in 2017 for scamming clients — to more serious ones. Kristy discovered that she had two large aneurysms on her aorta and had to have a pair of open-heart surgeries. “It turns out I was born with a bicuspid aortic valve, which somebody on the show should have noticed when I was going through the health screening,” she says. Kari was confined to a wheelchair and had to have her gall bladder removed. “They told me it was probably from starving myself [on the show],” she says.

Kristy and Kari say they and the other “Swan” contestants haven’t thought about filing a class-action lawsuit against the makers of the show, but the two found solace during the making of Carr’s documentary, which gave them much-needed closure. The final sequence of “The Swan: Behind the Mirror” sees the 12 women who participated in the film reunite for a celebratory dinner, reveling in each other’s company.

“The documentary has been the most healing I’ve been able to do in the past 22 years,” offers Kristy. “Erin made me feel valued and seen. I didn’t even know how much I needed this. I thought I’d gotten past it after all these years, but I’d just compartmentalized it. We went from trauma and drama to this awesome sisterhood.”

“It was healing in a way that you can’t even put into words,” adds Kari. “The weight that was lifted through this, and the girls that I can lean on, was healing and strengthened this bond that we have. I can’t wait for everyone to hear our story.”