Credit: Ryan Hartford/startraksphoto.com
The Swan, which aired for two seasons and a total of 18 episodes in 2004, is widely regarded as one of the most controversial reality shows.
This was largely due to its focus on plastic surgery as a tool for beauty, the pageant-style ending of each episode that pitted women against each other and sent a “failure” home, and growing concerns regarding medical ethics and contestants’ psychological harm.
As fans likely recall, one of the main plastic surgeons featured on the show was Real Housewives of Orange County husband Terry Dubrow.
Today, a documentary on Hulu entitled The Swan: Behind The Mirror was released, and Terry was notably absent.
At the end of the film, a message appears on the screen stating that Terry, 68, “declined to be interviewed for this film.”
Erin Lee Carr, who directed the film, spoke with Variety about why Terry didn’t participate in it.
Specifically, she revealed that Terry “wanted a sum of money that would never make sense for a documentarian to pay an expert.”
Erin alluded to it being “under $100,000 for one interview” that would have been included in the documentary.
Dr Terry Dubrow on The Swan
While he isn’t in the film, Terry did recently talk about The Swan on the We Need to Talk With Paul C. Brunson podcast, confirming the show was due to have a third season.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Once Peter Liguori took over as the Entertainment Chair at Fox, he decided to cancel The Swan.
In 2024, on a special for Vice TV, Terry also spoke about the show.
“This was the dawn of a new era both in reality TV and in plastic surgery,” he shared in regard to why he decided to do the show. “Even though it was gloriously interesting and exciting and fun, it was exhausting.”
“I think in the two weeks of everyday surgery that we did, we did something like 200 plastic surgery operations on these patients,” he added. “That was more than [what] a typical plastic surgeon would do in an entire year!”