Idiot Box Savant: "The Swan"

I used to be ugly!

By Andrew Kiraly

Happy Easter, fellow teletards. Hope you enjoyed your rabbity choco-meats. As for the Savant, I've had more than my fill of springtime yum, though I suspect there are a few delights still lurking in the scrummy underbrush of my basket's fake green straw that, I've discovered, blackens and crinkles up crazily when you accidentally set it on fire while pretending you are Moss Boy (long story). All in all, another glucotastic Easter; but I'm still bummed I didn't get a Cadbury Creme Jesus.

Anyway! T.S. Eliot, the dead/annoying poet, once said April is the cruelest month. Why? Because springtime asks us to renew ourselves, get rid of bad habits, drop the soiled Underoos of bad character and dig up better instincts to guide us among the rocks and crags of our piece-of-shit lives (admit it). Well, fortunately, plastic surgery has gotten so cheap that self-renewal is now as easy as downloading someone's identity off the Internet and slapping down his AmEx at Lipo Depot. Better yet, now America's unClearasiled masses can try to become a contestant on "The Swan" (FOX, Mondays, 9 p.m.), the show that takes 17 mewling motherfuglies (ahem, that's one step beyond mere fugly, parsed as motherfucking ugly), subjects them to terrorist face-attacks by a cadre of plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentists and dermatologists, and then pits these new byooties against each other in a brutal Thunderdome deathmatch! The chant thrums across the post-apocalyptic arena: Two fuglies enter, one fugly leaves...two fuglies enter...

Surely you've seen the countless plastic surgery reality shows already on TV. Well, as my limbless Iraqi readers know all too well by now, AMERICA WANTS MORE. So, with "The Swan," they've added a competitive element. At the end of the show, the two transformees--usually glum, sexless harumphs who probably reflexively scream "Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart!" during their annual orgasm--face up to a panel spray-tanned, bleach-toothed superdocs and ubermodels who get to pick who moves on to the next round. Second place gets free ribs at Applebee's or something.

And these fugly ducklings do get transformed. Take Rachel L., turned from a wan Midwestern troll into what looks like one of those artificially-outgoing-but-secretly-insecure sorority sluts. Or Kelly A., turned from a no-neck mu-mu duchess into, well, what looks like one of those artificially-outgoing-but-secretly-insecure sorority sluts. Lesson for today: Our culture's beauty standards are rigid and monolithic, whereas there are a thousand and one ways to be ugly. Embrace your individuality! Besides, with the money you save by accepting yourself, you can get laid the old-fashioned way: by buying a sports car.

The best part of the show is when the women finally get to see their new selves. See, during the whole process--much of which involves them wearing plastic surgeon's dotted lines around their flomping, soon-to-be-liposuctioned ass-flaps and equally flomping, soon-to-be-"enhanced" Swedish milkers, as well as Hellraiser-style dental headgear--zee ladies are forbidden to look in a mirror in mid-chopface. So, when the Moment of Truth finally arrives, you've got to understand that these ladies are still operating with their old AOL Gold 6.0 Muttface self-concept discs, and not their new AOL Platinum 7.0 with New Muttface Blocker self-concept discs. Thus the freako moment when the curtain is whipped away from the mirror and the Swan beholds herself anew. Oh, man, the prog is worth watching for this moment alone; in disturbingly uniform fashion, they all go, "Wa-huh! Wa-huh! I'm so beauuuutifulllll!" with this weird, choking peal like a constipated dolphin learning it's not the father of Tonisha's baby on "Maury."

Okay, some of the ladies do look humpalicious, and I'm all for recapturing femininity and beauty from the razor-lined monster mouth of Andrea Dworkin and Co., but, man, you gotta ask if the producers of "The Swan" have some kind of secret diabolical undercurrent to their handiwork; the Women: Reloaded have this sort of overripe pre-op tranny Glamour Shots drippiness to them, like that ever-tipsy aunt who comes to all the family weddings in order to slut around. Lesson #2: No amount of loveless sex will ever fill that emptiness inside. But as the soft-focus inspirational poster of the kitten tenaciously hanging from a clothesline instructs us, "Never give up!"