This show started out fake and just got faker. The premise: a first-grade teacher named Randi Coy has to convince her family that her faux engagement — to a guy she assumes is another contestant — is the real deal and get them all to her wedding in less than two weeks. If she succeeds, she will win $250,000 for herself and $250,000 for her mother, father and three siblings to share. The fiancé, Steve, is — as you might have guessed from the title — not exactly a dreamboat, but Coy manages to get her loved ones on board. On their wedding day, though, Steve admits that he is actually a professional actor who was trying to be as annoying as possible. As consolation for not being in on the joke, Coy walks away with double the money she expected: $500,000 for herself and $100,000 apiece for her family members. But for sitting through Steve’s awkward high jinks and the ensuing, unnecessary family trauma, the audience really should have gotten a piece of the action too.
Sometimes, even mildly famous 40-something rock stars from defunct ’80s hair-metal bands have trouble finding love. In 2007, Poison front man Bret Michaels decided it was time to settle down, so he searched for a woman the only way he knew how: by hosting a reality show in which 25 nipped, tucked, bleached, streaked and tanned women would compete for his affection. Michaels waded his way through stale cigarette smoke, spilled booze and miscellaneous bodily fluids (in one episode, one of his love interests projectile vomited at the dinner table) in search of the one woman who would steal his heart — or at the very least, give him a lap dance. Unfortunately, true love didn’t blossom, and at the end of the first season, Michaels’ pick for a partner told him she’d rather just be friends. The forlorn rocker tried again in Season 2, only to find out that one contestant, Daisy — who would later get her own spin-off skankfest, Daisy of Love — had a live-in ex-boyfriend back home. Season 3 upped the ante by having the women compete on a cross-country bus trip called Rock of Love Bus, at the end of which Michaels selected Penthouse‘s 2009 Pet of the Year as the woman he wanted to spend his life with. If those crazy kids can’t work it out, what hope do the rest of us have?
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
