Bridalplasty debuts tonight on E! at 9 p.m. Eastern.
Bridalplasty is even dumber than you would imagine, and I don’t mean that in a train-wrecky, compelling way. I, for one, am strangely fascinated by brides behaving badly, but if you want that, you’ll need to watch the always-dependable Bridezillas. Bridalplasty, however, at least makes stabs at being sincere, so yeah, I guess you should root for the gal who got married in City Hall because her mom was dying of cancer or the lady whose fiance is just back from Iraq, except, not only could one of them win her dream wedding, she gets her face cut up a lot as well, plus she won’t see her fiancé for four months. Congratulations?
Also, as the plastic surgeon puts it, the girls are “all so basically good-looking,” i.e., it’s not clear why any of them seek plastic surgery. So, aside from winning an all-expenses-paid “dream wedding,” it’s hard to see why any of them would be willing to get several rounds of painful, painful plastic surgery. (I know plastic surgery is painful because I used to share an office wall with the recovery room of a plastic surgery clinic, and the noises I would hear were like something from a horror movie.) Remember the show The Swan? There were a few girls on that show who, well, you couldn’t maybe blame for wanting to get a nose job or boob lift or something. While that show was horrendous in its own way, at least in some cases it got the casting right. There’s a segment of tonight’s episode of Bridalplasty, however, where the plastic surgeon gets out the ol’ magic marker and details what tweaks each girl could undergo, and I suppose the scene is supposed to be compelling for its cringe (or excitement?) factor, but like most parts of the show it’s just boring. The women just all look perfectly pleasant and normal, only soon one of them will look like she's had plastic surgery done. Hooray?
With a cast of contestants who aren’t compelling and a prize that’s not exactly enviable, the rest of the show collapses under itself. The show’s budget appears to be $5, and the girls are clearly coached to overreact to everything, especially those who scream and cry as they win a super-challenging puzzle-putting-together challenge (consisting of about 8 pieces making up a picture of themselves), the prize being an invitation to an injection party. That’s right. They battle it out over a puzzle probably meant for an 8-year-old for the privilege of having needles stuck in their faces with some toxin that will probably have worn off already by the time they get off the show. Whee?
Strictly from a TV-watcher’s perspective (and not as a woman or human being in general), if Bridalplasty had managed to cast the show with super-bitchy, uber-ugly women, then we’d have something cooking as we’d enjoy watching shitty, self-centered, deluded ladies tear each other apart, and we'd gawk with morbid curiosity at what happened to their faces. Or, this show could actually have been something clever if the creators had chosen to make it a dystopian satire about how we as a society view beauty and marriage, but this is E!, so let’s not kid ourselves.
Stray observations:
- “I want a syringe!” isn’t something you hear screamed on TV every day.
- Should a woman who exclaims things like “Oh my gosh! My puzzle was right!” legally be allowed to get married? That’s an awfully complicated thing, marriage, much moreso than a puzzle.