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Bravo is quickly becoming my favorite channel. There are now four sets of “Housewives,” and they’re all entertaining as hell. But I’m talking about a gem called “The Millionaire Matchmaker” (Tuesdays, 9 p.m.).
Patti Stanger is a self-proclaimed third-generation matchmaker in her 40s and just got a heart-shaped engagement ring from her long-term boyfriend. There’s nothing tackier than a fat diamond shaped like a heart.
Stanger only accepts millionaires into the Millionaire’s Club and then works with them to find the loves of their lives. She says she has a 99 percent success rate, but most of the rich men featured on the show don’t find love the first time around. I’m assuming this is because the ones who don’t fall in love are the more entertaining ones.
First Stanger and her colleagues watch a video sent in by the millionaire. Most of the time they brag about how much money they have and say they don’t want to date anyone over 30.
Let me take a moment to express how much this irks Stanger. She calls it ageism.
Fifty-something men who refuse to date women in their 40s or even their 30s because they’re too old, their eggs are dried up or for whatever other reason these men can come up with.
As a woman, this disgusts me. As a 21-year-old woman, this makes me want to contact Stanger and sign up for one of these sugar daddies.
Anyway, after watching a millionaire’s video, Stanger meets with them and tries to figure out “why they want love now.” The reason is usually because they’ve had their fair share of “blonde bimbos” and want something serious that will lead to marriage and kids. After Stanger meets with the men, the real fun begins.
For almost every man, Stanger hosts a “recruiting session” where she sifts through a boatload of women to find suitable ones to attend a “mixer” where the men get to interact with and choose a woman to go on a date with.
Stanger is brutally honest. And it’s great. She uses phrases like “floozy-woozy” and “trashy-bashy” to describe some of the women, and she says it to their faces. I appreciate this, because some women just need to know that their clothes are ugly, and that’s why they’re single.
Hearing Stanger make these insults truly comes to fruition when the cameras catch one of these bereft women saying that they “have better places to be than Patti’s stupid mixer” in the same tone as a 9-year-old. It seems especially childish if the woman is wearing pigtails and striped tights underneath a short jean skirt, which I’m pretty sure is an outfit someone actually wore once.
Stanger rarely sees a woman she doesn’t criticize. However, most of these women gladly lap up her advice because they want so badly to have a millionaire for a husband.
Here’s a tip for anyone who gets the urge to fly to L.A. and go to one of Stanger’s recruiting sessions after reading this review: wear your hair straight, and make it extra shiny. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Stanger, it’s that men hate curly hair. True or not, she sure makes you believe it.
The mixers are rather boring, unless you get the occasional “wack-a-doo” (Stanger’s words, not mine) who makes a fool of herself. The actual dates are usually pretty boring and often awkward, which is an emotion that I don’t like seeing portrayed on a screen.
On Tuesday’s episode, however, something happened that usually doesn’t. Jimmy D, who commonly refers to himself in the third person, chose exactly the type of girl that Stanger told him not to: a blonde named Angel. But this wasn’t the entertaining part.
Jimmy took her to Vegas and spent $100,000 on the entry fee so they could both play in a high-stakes poker game, even though Angel has never played poker. She ended up winning some money, though, and a good time was had by all. This is still not the entertaining part.
When Jimmy and Angel went to their respective hotel rooms to change for a fancy dinner, Angel went MIA. When he finally went up to her room, she answered the door with a look that said, “Yes, I have just woken up from a nap.”
Jimmy concluded that she had gone up to her room and downed a bottle of booze, and if her face wasn’t a dead giveaway, the fact that she said, “I just ate a steak and threw up,” was.
To me, TV doesn’t get any better than this.
But it does prove that Stanger knows what she’s doing. Maybe I’m naive, but I’d probably trust her to find the man of my dreams. TV editing aside, it really seems like this chick knows how to match. That alone won’t make me watch, but as for these girls who show up drunk on dates? Keep ’em coming, Bravo.
2 comments
While Patti can be quite animated at times, she does make the viewer think about what he/she is looking for in a partner.