By TONY CASE
September 2004

NELY GALÁN IS RUNNING LATE. The creator and executive producer of Fox Television's extreme-makeover reality hit The Swan, one of the most popular shows on English-language television among Hispanic viewers this past season, has spent a heat wave-cursed July morning at her Venice Beach, Calif., base. At task: helping a dozen staffers chip away at what's literally grown into a mountain of application letters - Galán says they stopped counting at 250,000 -from wannabe contestants of The Swan 2's upcoming season, which debuts on Oct 25. In a world in which everybody is looking for the elusive "crossover" hit that is equally appealing to Hispanic and non-Hispanic audiences, Galán has gone well beyond niche marketing. The premiere of the first season of The Swan, on April 7, was a slam dunk, scoring an 8.2 Hispanic household rating and snaring 1.4 million Hispanic viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. It beat the night's other hits among Hispanics, including Fox's American Idol and The Simpsons, as well as NBC's Friends and The Apprentice. (In total, premiere drew a whopping 15 million viewers.)

Slowing down for the first time that morning after sifting through heaps of mail, Galán plunks down on a gigantic, cream colored sofa in her cavernous, converted-warehouse digs and sporting a tight-fitting black tank emblazoned with the rhinestone-studded words "Ay Por Favor!" (the saucy equivalent of "Oh Please!"), Galán muses that many Hispanics were drawn to The Swan because, simply, viewers were able to see themselves in the self-improvement contest. The competition involved "life coaching" from Galán herself, along with workout and diet regimens and any number of dramatic surgeries on the faces and bodies of the willing women, culminating in a pageant whose winner would take home various prizes that included $50,000 cash and a Jaguar.

It's not news that Latinos remain a rare presence on reality programs - or any programs - on English-language TV. In fact, Latina visibility on The Swan almost didn't happen. Of the "hundreds of thousands" of applications for the first season, Galán estimates that only five percent were from minorities. So, Galán and Co. took aggressive measures - going on Spanish-language radio, taking ads in the newspapers and magazines, distributing leaflet - in order to drum up awareness and interest among Latinas. Ultimately, five of the 20 contestants who vied for the title of "the Swan" were Latina. (The winner was non-Latina Rachel Love-Fraser of Sammamish, Wash., who was featured on the cover of the June 7 People magazine.)

The rest is ratings history. "It takes a minority on the production team, pushing for that," says Galán, who had broken through two barriers by becoming the first woman and the first Hispanic executive producer in the hot - with no sign of cooling down - enterprise of reality TV.

Christy Haubegger, founder of Latina magazine and now a brand agent for Creative Artist Agency, has another take on The Swan's success with the Hispanic audience. "If you look at popular programming on Spanish-language television, they're all novelas, and the big novelas are always Cinderella stories," she says. "We're often the children of immigrants, and if that's not somebody who understands the potential of who you can become, I don't know what is."

Ratings notwithstanding, The Swan and Galán have had their detractors. USA Today television critic Robert Bianco called the show "obscene" and dubbed Galán "the kind of careless, mindless meddler whose 'helpfulness' has made life more difficult for everyone else since time began." Boston Herald critic Sarah Rodman found the show's pageant spectacle especially gruesome. "The idea," she wrote, "that someone who already identifies herself as 'ugly' could undergo $250,000 of improvements and still be deemed a loser."

Despite the awareness the show has brought to the business of plastic surgery, some doctors have scorned The Swan. In an interview from his Beverly Hills, Calif., office, cosmetic surgeon Peter Fodor, president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery and an outspoken critic of such nip-and-tuck reality shows, singled out The Swan for "trivializing the seriousness of surgery" and "promoting unrealistic expectations."

For her part, Galán has no problem with Fox hyping Swan surgeries in its promotion of the show. "That's what gets ratings, which is fine with me. I'm a businesswoman," she says flatly.
Aida Levitan, vice chairman and chief communications officer of Bromley Communications and immediate past president of the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, praises Galán for creating programming that is "culturally relevant" to the Hispanic population, something that the English-language networks have been "very slow" to do. "Nely is particularly adept at finding those hot buttons in the Hispanic community," she says.