Smallscreen News

'Bridalplasty' a brilliant move on E!'s part, sign of the times

By April MacIntyre Nov 28, 2010, 18:24 GMT

Series premiere tonight at 9 on E!

This Sunday on E! the new reality series "Bridalplasty" will take some soon-to-be-married and already married (but never had a real wedding) posse of ladies and offer them, by way of challenges, a step-ladder of minor invasive to full-on surgery fixes for the flab and folds that bedevil them.

This may have shocked ten years ago, but in this day of 18 year-olds getting preventive Botox to freeze their faces to prevent any lining, and men filling and tightening their faces with Juvaderm and thermage treatments, the good, bad and ugly of plastic surgery is all the rage in the Western world.

Good plastic surgery is brilliant, and buoying, done in the right hands. Southern California's Yale-trained facial surgeon Dr. Alexander Rivkin, who studies each patient's features carefully, tastefully enhances without surgery, and he has changed lives.

Bad plastic surgery is done by those with a distorted sense of aesthetics, and examples of this can be seen in the patient roster of the beloved late plastic surgeon, Dr. Frank Ryan, whose patients (Heidi Montag, Shauna Sand and more) were a who's who of what to avoid at all costs.

Or, going on the cheap. Botox parties and devil may care usage of injectibles by nurses or salon owners offering bargain face fillers is fraught with danger. One has only to look at poor Priscilla Presley, who had industrial silicone injected into her face and is now cursed. 

"Bridalplasty" features a giddy bordering on hysterical "injectables party," with a big syringe the women compete for, with the winner running to the show's go-to doctor, Dr. Terry Dubrow (The Swan), who jumps up and down with the "winner."

Odd scenes like this are punctuated by an even more odd personality, Shanna Moakler, an ex beauty queen and wife of rocker Travis Barker, who made her celebrity bones posing naked in Playboy.

This is the epitome of train wreck TV, and it serves the voyeuristic curiosity who crane necks to see if the surgeries and procedures actually do make a difference, and the schadenfreude-sters, the sicker side of the viewing public who hope to see an already normal looking person turn into a self-made freak.

Pass the popcorn.