The premise of “Bridalplasty” is simple: “Brides-to-be compete in challenges to earn plastic surgery procedures in a quest to win their ultimate dream wedding.” Before I started watching, I thought it was a show about average-looking women competing for a grand prize of plastic surgery before their wedding. Then I watched a few episodes and realized that it is a show about attractive women simultaneously competing for weekly surgeries and enacting the most gripping drama ever televised in the reality format. Then I KEPT WATCHING and discovered the true meaning of inner beauty. “Bridalplasty” is, at its core, the worst idea for a TV competition ever conceived, let alone produced. But somehow, those crazy executives at the E! channel covered it up with so many distractions that the show as a whole is excellent.
During the first episode, each bride consults with a plastic surgeon and crafts a wish list of procedures that, if all completed, will make her “the perfect bride.” The wished-for procedures cover everything from liposuction to veneers. Personally, I was surprised that only one contestant wanted laser hair removal. Who wants to have great tits but be stuck shaving their legs? Many of the contestants’ wish lists are bizarre even beyond the lack of desire for hair removal. Cheyenne, who already looks like a plastic surgery victim, wants the mystifying “shorten second toe.” Almost unilaterally everyone wants “liposuction of knees” – how does that happen? Where on the knee is there lipo to be suctioned? Behind the kneecap? One girl also wants her “ears pinned back.” How do you decide to have that done to your head, and how does a doctor do that? I suppose that the show’s surgeon, Dr. Terry Dubrow, is enthusiastic enough about altering these women’s bodies that he’s willing to try something that crazy. During the filmed procedures he acts slaphappy, maybe even drunk. Over the course of the season, the “Bridalplasty” operating room plays host to the best anti-plastic-surgery footage I have ever seen (and I watched a significant portion of “The Swan”) thanks to Dr. Dubrow’s antics.
If the plastic surgery is the medically-enhanced face of the show, the challenges are the heart of the show. No bones about it: I started watching to see those girls get sliced and diced. But I stayed when I realized how brilliantly the “Bridalplasty” challenges are crafted. They hook the girls and their fiancés up to LIE DETECTOR TESTS, for Christ’s sake, and then they ask them intrusive questions about their sex lives. IT’S AWESOME. The girls also have to manhandle crash test dummies into Kama Sutra positions with no pictures, only the verbal guidance of their teammates. THEN they do a photo scavenger hunt with their future mothers-in-law. Tyra Banks has got nothing on this, bro. She might talk the “true inner beauty” talk, but these brides-to-be walk the inner beauty walk.
The challenges and surgeries provide an excellent framework, but without a particularly dysfunctional bunch of brides, the show would be nothing. E! definitely delivers crazies. But by the finale, I was so invested in these women’s lives that I was screaming at my computer screen. Through the insanity of the house drama, the simultaneous hilarity and brutal honesty of the challenges, and the plain old grossness of the surgeries, the girls really wormed their way into my heart.
My two favorite contestants (and, spoiler alert, the two finalists), Allison and Janessa, provide such a lovely example of the meaning of true inner beauty that one questions whether the producers had a hand in the eliminations. Allison is truly transformed over the course of the show. She acquires self-confidence after her liposuction and turns from a down on her luck mopey trucker bride into a vibrant and cheerful woman who is visibly glowing. It’s a beautiful story. Janessa, on the other hand, is just a heartless bitch the whole time. She sucks major. Basically a soap opera villain, she refers to herself as “the puppet master” and continues to scheme even while dosed with heavy sedatives. It is rather impressive the way that her bandaged little rat face contorts with the complexities of social strategy post-nose-job. Even now, weeks after screaming that she should die during the finale, I still feel a shiver down my spine during moments of quiet introspection when the thought of her puppet-mastery crosses my mind.
So here’s the deal: if you want to watch Tyra rant and rave about true inner beauty, keep watching America’s Next Top Model. I certainly plan on watching the Cycle 15 premiere. But if you want to really know the meaning of inner beauty, watch “Bridalplasty.” Everything comes full circle when it is revealed that the winner of the perfect wedding will be chosen by none other than the contestants previously kicked off of the show. In other words, every single girl who had her dreams of the perfect wedding shattered in front of her eyes is given the chance to choose who they think should win: Allison, or Janessa. Really, it’s almost worth watching the entire show just to see Janessa’s face in the finale when she gets totally owned by Alexandra, one of the girls she schemed against during the course of the show. “Karma’s a bitch,” Alexandra says, “and so are you.” And in that moment, the world, just like the winner’s wedding, is perfect.
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