Galán, 40, has been pushing to put Hispanic faces and voices into mainstream American media for more than two decades, and by now her resume is well known. She immigrated with her parents from Cuba at the age of two and grew up in New Jersey. By the age of 22 she was running New Jersey's Spanish-language WNJU-TV, then owned by legendary TV producer Norman Lear and future Univision CEO Jerry Perenchio. Later, Galán would co-create HBO's Spanish-language production arm Tropix. By 1994, she would start her own company, Galan Entertainment, and link up with News Corp. and Fox to produce English-and Spanish-language programming.

In 1998, Galán shifted gears yet again, becoming entertainment president of Telemundo. There, Galán made her biggest splash to a point - some of her pet projects made more of a belly flop. While novelas ruled the roots in Spanish-language television - and still do - Galán boldly introduced the sitcom to the field with the series Los Beltran, Viva Vegas and Solo en America. While those programs were ahead of their time, they were not around for very long. After delivering ratings that fell short of justifying their hefty budgets, Telemundo and it's corporate parent at the time, Sony Corp., pulled the plug.

In October 1999, Galán, after 14 months, left Telemundo just after it had brought in a new president and CEO, Jim McNamara, but not before inking a two-year development deal with Telemundo and Columbia TriStar. Galán admits now that running a network "wasn't a nice fit for me," and she doesn't blame Telemundo and Sony for yanking her projects. "A corporation behaves in a certain way, "she shrugs. "What am I going to do, change a corporation?"

Telemundo's McNamara credits Galán with forcing the network to "think outside the box" adding "to this day, there's a Nely sort of angle that's still present in all our programming." He says Galán "has a never-ending passion for her Hispanic roots and for seeing Hispanic images, storylines and faces in Spanish-language shows and English-languages shows in a very positive way."

It was in 2003 that Galán began laying the groundwork for her reality empire. Last September, Telemundo introduced the Galán produced reality dating series La Cenicienta (Cinderella), in which a young Hispanic single mother is courted by a diverse group of suitors who must pass her family's evaluation. (Following the rhythm of novelas, Telemundo aired La Cenicienta nightly for six weeks.) La Cenicienta and other reality shows - like the previous Protagonistas (Protagonists), a Big Brother of sorts - have proved ratings winners for Telemundo, which still struggles to catch up to ratings-dominant Univision. (La Cenicienta returns for a second season in January.) In his recently published book, The New Mainstream: How the Multicultural Consumer Is Transforming American Business, journalist Guy Garcia reports that La Cenicienta gave Telemundo "a much needed traction in its lopsided battle with Univision."

Then, Galán hit the mother lode this past spring with The Swan, whose second season started production in mid-August - after all those applications has been sorted through. "It's my unique niche in Hollywood, to always have one foot in English and one foot in Spanish," Galán says. Never one to underestimate herself, the producer adds, "I am the only Hispanic who can go sell to Latin America and who knows all the network presidents. I know everybody in Latin America, I know everybody in the Spanish market and everybody in the English market. That's a unique proposition." (In naming her one of the "25 Most Powerful Hispanics in Hollywood" in 1998, Hispanic Magazine reported that Galán "has unparalleled access to Hollywood brass.")

Galán says that marketers still do not understand that, while Hispanics are a niche group, they also are complex. Galán notices more than a numbers game. "The simple issue is, 20 years ago people thought, the Hispanic market, great. Then they realized that it's a market with nuances, unlike the African-American market, which is one market, really. Then they started saying, 'Oh my God, there's Cubans and Mexican and Puerto Ricans,' so it became intimidating. But it's very simple - it's a market that is segmented but which has unifying threads."

So many of Galán's productions - including The Swan and La Cenicienta - echo the producer's own varied experiences. The idea for the Fox hit came about after Galán considered getting a breast lift following the birth of her child, Lukas, now four years old. (Galán opted for single parenthood after giving up on her son's "fixer-upper" father; that relationship followed a failed marriage in her 20s.) Galán says she never had the procedure - but still might someday - and that she has never had reconstructive surgery. She does admit to getting Botox injections and porcelain veneers. The raven-haired self-starter insists she could stand to lose a few pounds - but adds that she's ok with that. "I don't need to be anorexic to feel good about myself," she affirms.

CONFIDENCE IS ALL HERS: Executive Producer Nely Galán received more than 250,000 applications for the second season of The Swan, which premiers October 25.

No one denies that Galán has lived an accomplished and colorful life, but do her experiences really qualify her to dispense life advice to the self-esteem-challenged "ugly ducklings" of The Swan? Galán says Fox's executives vice president for alternative programming, Mike Darnell - who green-lighted The Swan on the spot during the pitch meeting with Galán, something that rarely happens - insisted that she become the show's life coach. As Galán explains, "All the life coaches we were interviewing were too nice, in a way. I've had life coaches myself. I don't pay them to tell me what I want to hear."

As for slams over The Swan's plastic surgery element, Rachel Love-Fraser - reached by phone at her Washington state home, her life getting back to normal after her "Swanning" - says the hysteria is overblown. "I say to people out there that plastic surgery will not fix all your problems. Ultimately, we went out there knowing that we wanted to change our lives, and that's what happened. Everybody loves that kind of Cinderella story." An unabashed admirer of Galán, with whom she maintains some contact, Love-Fraser adds, "She has an energy about her that makes you want to be where she's at."

Everyone who succeeds has detractors, says Richard Perez-Feria, editor of Time Inc.'s People En Espanol, which this past June selected Galán as one of its "50 Most Beautiful People." The editor says he has heard The Swan called everything from "innovative" to "the end of Western civilization, as we know it." But he's not one to point out others' foibles. "It's easy to sit on the sidelines and say, 'Oh, how horrible.' Is The Swan ultimately the single best show to represent America? Perhaps not. But as a pure entertainment vehicle, few producers in Hollywood would pass it up, given the chance."
Ana Maria Fernandez-Haar, chairman of Miami-based agency IAC Group, dismisses much of the criticism of Galán and The Swan as ignoring the obvious fact that we lived in a superficial and self-improvement-seeking world long before the reality show burst on the scene. "Fitness, surgery - it was all around long before The Swan. Nely did not initiate that," she says. "The largest category of books is self-help. What is wrong with being well-adjusted and nice, inside and out?"

Galán clearly feels that if she's not being provocative, she's not doing her job. She says that when she creates any show, she "channels" her old boss Norman Lear, who changed the face of television in the late 1970s with button-pushing sitcoms All in the Family, Maude and Good Times. Galán's upcoming Telemundo project, El Principe Azul, she promises, will deal with "class issues among Hispanics that we never talk about. I'm going to blow it up, really go for it."

At the end of the day, the producer maintains she doesn't pay much mind to any personal condemnation or her work. After all, being an ambitious, successful, divorced, fully bicultural, Latina single mom, she's used to not living according to other people's exceptions.

"As an artistic person, if you do something that pushes buttons, people are going to like it or not like it. I'm attracted to… the struggle with conventionality," she says. "It's the story of Hispanics caught between two worlds. And I think that is my unique voice."

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