As I am, you tend to watch a lot of superfluous television. And so it was last night when I sat down to watch Fox’s reality show-beauty-contest-Queen-for-a-day hybrid “The Swan”. The premise is utterly Orwellian in it’s simplicity. Two female” ugly ducklings are selected for their alleged physical and spiritual wretchedness, a crack team of plastic surgeons, cosmetologists, therapists, and trainers are unleashed on these poor bints in an effort to transform them into beautiful women. The one whose “transformation” is the greatest gets to compete in a “swan pageant” for a beauty queen type prize.
Of course this IS a Fox program so a great deal of manipulation and hyperbole goes into the process. Both women in their “pre transformation” phase are deliberately harshly lit and clearly enjoined from using cosmetics of any kind in order to present an image of hopeless schlub-dom. Last night we got a widow and a female police officer both with husbands and children desperately seeking physical salvation and validation.
And what the hell, it worked…to the extend that three months of cosmetic surgery, diet, and a team of make up artists transformed two disparate females into the exact same woman!
They both ended up blonde, thin, with dazzling ersatz teeth and tarted up in the sort of formalwear Donald Trump forces on his fiancee’. Honestly I think “The Swan” is what would’ve been the late Rod Serling’s idea of a “reality TV show”.
I turned it off around the forty five minute mark as I couldn’t figure out which woman could have credibly claimed to have “crossed the most ground” in the journey from wretch to princess. To my unpracticed eye it looked like they were twins…blonde, skinny, ebullient and vacuous. How d’ye judge between them?
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