Was ‘The Swan’ really as bad as we remember?

When it comes to reality television, few shows are as reviled as The Swan, the 2004 Fox series that transformed self-proclaimed “ugly ducklings” into beautiful swans via plastic surgery, diet, exercise, and more.

Indeed, Entertainment Weekly even named the show to its list of worst reality TV shows ever produced. But, in a world of Instagram filters, influencers, Kardashians, and Real Housewives, is the show really as terrible as its legacy would have us believe? Creator Nely Galán and some of the former Swans don’t think so.

Ironically, some of the show’s biggest issues lie not so much in the show itself, but in its image and editing. Galán, who originally conceived of the show for Spanish television as the former President of Entertainment of Telemundo, says she wanted to approach the series as a top-to-bottom transformation, one that allowed women to address their insecurities not merely through physical changes but through mental and emotional ones as well.

“The audience didn’t get to see the degree to which those women had to go to therapy every day,” Galán tells EW. “Because the whole point was even if you change your looks, if you don’t change your inside, you’re going to still have all the issues that you had before. I believe that more than ever now. Agency is the key word — you have to have your own agency to decide what it is you want.”

Indeed, many women have spoken out about the career coaching and other resources they were offered in casting, only for the show to focus predominantly on the physical components.

Galán first got the idea for The Swan from a Venezuelan finishing school that transformed women and prepared them to enter the Miss Universe contest — and she thinks some of the disconnect in the response to the show stems from cultural differences. “I’m from Cuba,” she explains. “Beauty is a currency. I saw the world from the point of view of a Latina woman and my filter was so different because in Spanish language TV and in Latin TV, what we thought was okay was different.”

Fresh off having a baby, Galán was also feeling the need for a makeover herself, which sparked the idea. “I was like, ‘I feel horrible. I need therapy. I need a boob job. I need so many things,’” she recounts. “So, I started thinking, ‘What if we took women that have had very difficult things happen to them and give them a finishing school, but make it more holistic — inside, outside, everything from therapy to life coaching to exercise?”

Along similar lines, Galán notes that if she were rebooting the show today she would also add an economic component, helping women transform their confidence and find power through entrepreneurship and pathways beyond beauty.

Ultimately, Galán couldn’t make the required budget for The Swan work for Telemundo, but when she brought the concept to her friend, Mike Darnell, who was then in charge of reality television at Fox, he ran with it — and turned it into a reality competition series that didn’t completely align with Galán’s original vision.

Former contestants, Kelly Alemi and Kelly Becker, describe their journey to the show as one mirroring exactly what Galán hoped for. Shy and insecure, they both came in with specific things they wanted addressed — Becker wanted a nose job to correct a crooked nose that she’d been bullied for her entire life, and Alemi was seeking a boob job to correct the fact that her breasts were two different cup sizes. But more than that, they were at a point in their lives where they felt stuck and were seeking a major change.

“They were talking about how it was going to be a life makeover on the inside and out,” says Becker of her initial interviews at casting calls. “There was going to be cosmetic dentistry, plastic surgery. You were going to have a personal trainer, a life coach, a nutritionist, a therapist, all of that. It just seemed like for a woman to have this kind of life transformation, to have all these experts at the tip of your fingers — to want to improve your looks, your mentality, how you feel about yourself internally — it felt like a dream.”

Adds Alemi: “Nely is basically my fairy godmother. It’s like we were all Cinderellas waiting to be transformed.”

Becker primarily went in seeking rhinoplasty, but after being evaluated by the show’s cosmetic surgeons, she ended up also getting cheek and chin implants and an earlobe reduction. She initially rejected the notion of cheek implants but changed her mind. “Never on the show was I ever pressured into getting things I didn’t want to do,” she stresses. “I can’t look at my experience and say there was anything that was bad there. I wasn’t pressured into anything. It really was like a dream.” (Other contestants, including Cindy Ingle, have said that they “really didn’t know” that they “could say no to some of the procedures being done.”)

Alemi probably had the least extreme makeover of anyone on the show, opting only for breast implants, Botox, Lasik, and veneers, but no additional procedures. In fact, she emphatically denied surgeons’ suggestion that she get a nose job, preferring to keep her face as close to what she was born with as possible.

The pitfalls and fallout of these procedures are well documented. Becker had to have her veneers repaired only six months after the show because they were not fitted properly (the dentist on the show eventually lost her license), while Alemi says she has replaced her breast implants as is necessary with age. There are other contestants who have had deeper medical complications or mental health challenges they blame on the show. But both Becker and Alemi believe that it was always fairly upfront that they were being given procedures that came with risks and could require long-term upkeep.

“I knew we were given these gifts and it was going to be our jobs to maintain them,” says Becker. Though she does posit that her veneer issue stemmed from the show’s emphasis on time and efficiency over all else.

Indeed, both women emphatically state that they would do the show again in a heartbeat, with one major change: no beauty pageant. Said pageant is also where Galán says Fox deviated from her original conception of the show. She had always wanted a pageant to be the conclusion of the show where the Swans could display their newfound confidence, but she never wanted it to be a competition.

“I thought everybody should go to the pageant,” she says. “Not that in every episode, they were going to pick one (girl to go to the pageant). On Fox in that era, every show had to end with a competition like American Idol. But I would not have done that. I would’ve just sent everybody to the pageant, like a fun thing. The whole idea was that the women were going to vote on who worked the hardest to make herself the best she could be.”

In the end, Darnell reworked the show to pit two women against each other in every episode, competing for their spot in the final pageant at the behest of outside judges rather than their peers. He also re-edited the show two weeks before its premiere to focus more on surgery and drama as opposed to Galán’s more holistic approach.

“When I saw the re-edit, I was crying because I thought, ‘It doesn’t show the therapy,’ and Mike Darnell said to me, ‘Why are you crying?’” Galán adds. “And I go, ‘Because that’s not my intention.’ Back then, I regretted it terribly. And I thought, ‘Why are we doing that? Women have enough problems in today’s world.’”

Becker and Alemi say they had no knowledge of the pageant concept and the show’s competition format when they initially signed on — and they both say they may not have participated if that had been mentioned from the first casting call. It wasn’t the notion of the pageant itself they took issue with so much as the competitive aspect, which they both feel ran contrary to the entire purpose of the show.

“I really wish they would’ve given that a second thought,” says Becker. “Because you take this big group of girls, you make them over physically and mentally. All of us were feeling great about ourselves. And to have it as a competition in the end, it brought me back to the days of the bullying when you just didn’t feel good enough. It did cross my mind for a moment — ‘Why didn’t I continue on? I did everything with the program. I worked really hard in the gym. I followed my diet, so, why was I not chosen to continue on?’ To build you up to feel good about yourself and then in the end of it all, to say you’re not good enough, it wasn’t fair to us. They should have all let us go.”

Alemi notes that what made it even harder was the fact that the women bonded intensely in the weeks leading up to the competition. “We became super close, and then they pair you up against your friend,” she explains. “Just imagine you and your best friend going out, and then you go for this job, and then you both get it and are like, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be at the same job. This is going to be fantastic.’ And then in six months they say, ‘Okay, the two of you have the same project and one of you is going home and the other one you’re going to be unemployed.’ That’s how it was. It’’s basically telling you you’re not good enough. You don’t measure up to what the producers or society thinks you should look like, even though we all looked amazing.”

Both women say it was a difficult pill to swallow amidst the messages of transformation and the confidence boost that came with the changes from The Swan. If Galán had it to do over again, she says she wouldn’t eliminate the competitive aspect but reframe it. “If you’re doing a sport, you compete with other people,” she explains. “It’s not so much about beauty or I’m prettier than you, but if we’re both saying we want to be the best us that we can be, who really worked for it and who didn’t?”

Alemi says that sense of “working for it” can be seen in the variety of responses to the show from the contestants. “You got out of it what you put into it,” she says. “You weren’t going there to get all this s— for free and then not going to have to put something out to make yourself better. Because even though you look different on the outside, you still had a lot of stuff to do on the inside. And I feel like that’s what I did. Any negative impact that people took away from the show was more about what they brought to the table or participated with than anything the show did.”

While Alemi is proud that The Swan paved the way for normalizing cosmetic procedures as a way to find inner confidence, she also notes that the outside messaging is so much worse now than it was when the show aired. “It’s super important for people to understand that everybody has strengths and weaknesses,” she notes. “Even the ones that are put together like the Kardashians are not perfect. They’ve gone through their share of s— because of social media, where we were fortunate enough to where we could only see it in the magazines when we got home.”

Even with more distance between feedback from the outside world, Alemi found much of the criticism of the show hypocritical, noting that people were quick to call the women on the show “shallow” or worse, without acknowledging their own role in perpetuating beauty standards or seeking to understand the courage it required to become a Swan.  

“I wish people would’ve gotten to understand the real reasons we were there,” she reflects. “People threw stones at us and they never even got to the meat of why we were really there. If they got to know the actual Swans, then they would see we really put everything on the line.”

Alemi explains that many women who participated on the show, including herself, ended serious relationships after their transformations because the show gave them the confidence to ask for what they deserved. “It’s not that we all became these cocky princesses,” she quips. “But it basically gave us the balls to stand up and say, ‘Look, we survived this’ and we only had each other to lean on.”

Galán echoes this, praising the normalization of cosmetic procedures via Instagram and reality television, while also emphasizing the importance of not losing sight of the internal work required. It’s something she believes in so passionately that she pursued a doctorate in psychology after The Swan.

“We all wish that the world was different and that women could be judged for other things,” she reflects. “It’s not fair and it’s tough the way we’re judged. But I know now that that’s my work that I have to do inside of myself. I can’t expect the world to make me feel better about me. I have to do that work myself. The world has caught up to the show because whether we judge women harshly or not, which we do, what we decide to do about it is our own choice.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

“It’s all normalized,” she continues. “This generation has lot of transparency about their feelings, about what bothers them, about what they think they’ve taken in from the culture, and they’re very proactive about it. You have to really do your own work. Young women today are realizing that mental health is a big deal and all that stuff that you take in from the outside could be toxic. But the world isn’t going to change it. You have to change. It is your own job with yourself.”

Mike Darnell did not immediately respond to EW’s request for comment.