Are You the One? is back for another season, and if you thought there couldn’t possibly be enough people willing to brawl on national television while ostensibly searching for an MTV-sanctioned soul mate, well, you clearly have no idea how much pocket money can be earned shilling teas that will cause you to shit out your spleen on Instagram. But there’s no denying this show is poppy escapism, so let’s just go ahead and pretend. Let’s pretend the participants are truly invested in finding love and not in parlaying their appearances into careers in the Reality Arts. Let’s pretend being followed by cameras is totally conducive to forming healthy relationships. And let’s also pretend a few of these contestants will feel just a teensy bit of internal shame for what we’ll all eventually be exposed to when they stumble into a location actually named “The Boom-Boom Room.”
There are certain actions so egregious that one cannot ever adequately atone for having participated in them. This assortment of garbage behavior runs the gamut, from eating the very last bakery cookie – the one I was saving to nibble while watching Southern Charm, though I swear this is a purely fictitious example and I didn’t recently go ape-shit on anyone – to locking children in cages, right here on U.S. soil. Yes, there is a wide range of misdeeds on the YOU ARE NOT MISTAKEN; I REALLY AM THIS DISGRACEFUL OF A HUMAN BEING list, and somewhere smack in the middle of said list is the choice to willfully hock a gigantic loogie onto someone’s head from a balcony.
With only a few episodes of Ex On the Beach left to go, I find myself wondering: what will become of the villa itself? Though I have not wasted one centile of a millisecond contemplating the future of the relationships hatched like tubs of doomed Sea Monkeys in that house, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the house itself and the relics that will undoubtedly be left behind. I’m just being pragmatic here. Not only do some members of this cast strike me as incompetent when it comes to impersonating human beings, but don’t they also strike you as incompetent packers? I’m therefore imagining half-squeezed tubes of kiwi-flavored lube shoved under beds and shorts that do not cover the labia piled high in the corner of the bedroom closet. I’m betting almost-empty bottles of booze – the only liquid remaining a cocktail of backwash and whatever dribbled out of Faith’s ass crack during her last booty shot of the season – will dot every countertop. There will be a bounty of shit left behind (of this I am certain) and I would like to implore the cleaning crew to not sell any of it on eBay. Sure, there are some crazy people out there who would probably love to tack a used condom filled with the DNA of an MTV “star” up in their basement, but for the sake of humanity in general, can I please make a recommendation? Can the crew instead gather all the crap they find, dig a hole at least sixteen feet deep, and bury that pathetic collection in the ground by only the waxy light of a very full moon? And can they chant words like “Gucci!” or shriek sentences like “Angela needs an exorcism!” as they pile mounds of dirt back on top of the hole in an effort to protect all of civilization? I realize such an act will require a ton of work, so if the chanting and the digging are too much, perhaps the forgotten shit can just be heaved into one of those currently simmering volcanoes. Any geologist who has seen even ten short seconds of this show will totally understand.
Welcome to MTV’s Ex On the Beach, a social experiment the founders of television could never have expected to transpire, not even on the days they drank straight scotch until they saw only static. This program brings reality stars and “social media stars” – and if you’re not already sighing heavily, we can never be friends – into a gorgeous villa in Hawaii so they can be manipulated while cameras film every second of their inebriated time. Join me from the comfort of your sofa (where, hopefully, there’s nary an ex in sight) as we witness fitness models, a DJ, and former contestants from shows like Big Brother, The Bachelor, and Are You the One as they head to what they pretended to believe would be paradise until the producers revealed the real plot: that their exes would eventually wash upon the shores like debris and subsequently scatter the senses of every single person present.
