OK, I loved it.
Read no further if you wish to be surprised by Mark’s final bridal decision.
I had some qualms with the series by its mid-point, but after re-watching those episodes with my brother, I became less bothered by the easy jokes and more enamored of the dead-on lampooning of reality television, a phenomenon that I wholeheartedly despise.
I have read that director/star Ken Marino and his wife, writer Erica Oyama, are actually fans of reality TV, but I see Burning Love as something of a hate letter to the Bachelor-type programming that lines women up to compete for a man who they don’t know.
Annie’s acquiescence to entering the “Boom Boom Room” doesn’t win her a hose, but does elicit a visual recounting of the evening from Mark and his fingers gesticulating intercourse for an uncomfortably long time on camera.
Marino and Oyama saved the cruelest cut for the only contestant who fit the mold, the one who seems too smart to be there but shows up because everyone else does. Poor Annie. She’s like America and reality TV.
Annie (Abigail Spencer). Her jokes, poems, and cooking are all out of Mark’s reach. She does make it to the boom-boom room, but this only results in humiliation and tears. She should’ve listened to her brother.
Annie, the perfect candidate, the only not-crazy one, the kindhearted kindergarten teacher, the earnest cook, the sexually ingratiating (even Haley didn’t put out, at least not to Mark), was all set up to receive the final hose, the marriage proposal, when even she in the end was rejected – by Mark on bended knee!
Janet Varney as Carly, the most reluctant of the contestants. I like to think her mother tricked her into being on the show.
And Carly’s rejection, followed by her giddy-headed sprint into the limo, which she ordered to “Go! Go!” before closing the door behind her, got the best laugh out of a character that I felt was sort of played out by the first few episodes.
That DOES NOT, however, count the “family” episode, when we get to meet the families of not just Carly, but Annie, and TITI as well.
For me, this may have been the series highlight.
Carly’s mother (Mo Gaffney) – desperate to lock her lesbian daughter into hetero marriage, critiquing Carly’s body (just bones and muscle, nothing soft to hold onto), and then offering up herself sexually to push Mark over the edge.
Annie’s normal family, who frighten Mark by mentioning Annie as a little girl, leading his absurdly concrete mind to the conclusion that she was a dwarf who had “grown out of it.” This leads to a dispute with the family as to whether people grow out of dwarfism. They have to agree to disagree, though there is a quick shot of the mother crying and being consoled in the aftermath. I also enjoyed Annie’s brother urgently trying to get her out of the house like he was rescuing her from a cult. I think cults make more sense than The Bachelor.
Brian George in some other show unworthy of his deft comedy.
And TITI’s father! Brian George! In a show that didn’t really go for nuance, his subtle facial expressions and precision timing made a perfect counterpoint to Ken Marino’s seismic buffoonery.
Ken Jeong as Chang on Community. He is wearing a bald cap that will soon be topped by a blonde wig. You have to watch “Documentary Filmmaking Redux” to understand why.
In the finale, none of the remaining three ended up with the prize; instead, we get Ken Jeong’s Ballerina, who Mark never technically eliminated himself – Ballerina was voted off in the first show by the ladies. Now Mark gets Ballerina back for the proposal! Ken Jeong in a blonde wig is not entirely novel. (Please see him as Jeff Winger’s understudy in the Community episode “Documentary Filmmaking Redux” and you’ll see it go even a step further, with a blonde wig atop a bald cap. ”The Asian guy really pops,” exalts one of The Dean’s superiors. And holy shit, he is right.)
Ballerina does offer something new here, however. Jeong plays the character with no effort whatsoever at the femininity stipulated in these stupid fucking shows. He lumbers around in the gown as if he were wearing a towel around his waist while fixing toast in the kitchen. Though elegance and grace are absent entirely, his sexuality is only a notch less base than Haley’s. He is repeatedly spread-legged and hiking the dress up to his crotch. And his seduction with the phallic carrot shoved in Marino’s mouth isn’t even flirty; it’s like an aggressively public precursor to sex as raw as the root vegetable stuffed into down bachelor’s throat. Jeong’s leering eyes and lewd laughter bring Ballerina all the more out of the outlandish artifice of the scenario and right into sheer vulgarity, which is really the essence of the dating reality show genre.
In a sense, he epitomizes the genre perfectly. No lady would participate in this shit, and Ballerina is no lady.
That is the best part.
Mark’s obliviousness to Carly’s barely closeted lesbian,
The faces of Carly: mostly dismay, discomfort, disgust, and disbelief.
to Haley’s sloppy slattern,
Messy taco time for the perpetually bottomless Haley (Natasha Leggero).
to Vivian’s full-term pregnant flight attendant (plus his startling misconception of human conception)
Vivian (Morgan Walsh) likes props.
made him a glorious idiot, misconstruing and misinterpreting everything in his sphere. It’s only fitting that he should choose a man in the laziest drag this side of a fraternity prank to be his bride. TITI may have had the titties, but Ballerina has that je-ne-sais-quoi allure: a dick under his dress.
Ballerina’s triumphant return, complete with full-on kissing and vigorous ass groping from Mark, also makes us question the hunky fireman at the center of the show. Judging from the specific searches on this blog, it appears that there are plenty of viewers who found a special appeal in Ballerina, not just as humorous, but as sexxxy, not gay-sexy, but trans-sexy. Maybe Mark is amongst them, and he just hasn’t quite figured it out yet. He hasn’t figured much of anything out: poems, pregnancy, or even how to put on pants. Ballerina will have plenty to teach him on their wedding night.
I now hold out a hope for another season of Burning Love so that the coupled Kens, Marino and Jeong, can return to counsel the new bachelor and his slew of hopefuls. Or since they used locations favored by The Biggest Loser, maybe they should turn their attentions to make-overs – obesity and drastic plastic surgery are both leitmotifs in current U.S. culture. Either way, I think the reality show parody still has some mileage in it before it becomes completely indistinguishable from its source material.
How it all began. Oh, Tamara #2, how your monkey heart captured my human one.
Doris W.
mrlousy
Raúl Zingle
Your descriptions of Ballerina, laziest drag and Fixing toast in the kitchen, are dead-on. A perfect ending to a not so perfect show!
I’ve have been wanting to write a proper comment on the original BL post since, well since you posted it but as you may have noticed I am a bit behind. I stopped watching BL after the date with the old lady. It all seemed too easy as you said. Reality TV is a whopping gaping target and the women and men are just too awful. Yet, as much as I enjoy mean humor especially targeting these self-involved blockheads – hello The Soup – I couldn’t get into BL. Even 8 min seemed too long. I wanted it to be weirder or meaner and I just wasn’t getting either.
But reading your summaries of later episodes and the finale, I may have to finish it out. I hate reality TV because too many of them showcase the worst kind of women – shrieking, vicious whores – who are so damaged they can find validation only from a man and will gut their own mothers to get it. They are so gross, whether the monied Real Housewives or fucked up trash on Bad Girls Club. They are all scarily motivated to beat out the other women, sometimes literally, for attention and manage to make everything they wear look trashy.
I’ve never watched any of these shows. I’ve tried a couple of times just to see what the fuss was about but I get most of my info from The Soup. For a brief time I did watch the Millionaire Matchmaker because I just couldn’t believe it. At least The Bachelor/ette, pretend it’s about love. MM blatantly says, yeah this guy’s a jerk but he’s got money, who wants to sleep with him for it? Patty Stengler is brutal with the candidates – telling them to change their hair color, dress differently, don’t say that or whatever to better their chances of snagging the rich douche during the cocktail party, aka slut parade. And the man always has some shiver inducing moment during his appraisal of the buffet of women presented to him that is extra nauseating. Yet the man is in control.
But this seems to be par for the course for reality tv. Even in this skewed universe populated by these rotten humanoids, somehow the women are still the second class citizens and come out looking worse than the men. The men are dopes and sometimes mean but at least you don’t have to turn the volume down. Even on the reverse shows like The Bachelorette the girl looks like the sucker.
I don’t mean to get too heavy here. The idea of Carly sprinting to the exit limo is pretty funny. And having the Normals till the end is also encouraging. But having Ballerina win is awesome. Bringing back someone ejected is a classic reality TV move. I like to imagine the non-existent Burning Love producers discussing the engineering of the finale – because the least realistic TV is reality TV.
Producer 1, douchey male exec – So who’s this dick going to put a ring on?
Producer 2, hardened female exec – Well we have to have tits on. That’s a given.
P1 – Duh. Should we bring someone back?
P2 – Yeah, but you’ll never guess who’s been trending.
P1 – Agnes.
P2 – Ballerina.
P1 – The chick with the dick? You are shitting me.
P2 – Nope, people REALLY like her. She’s got the most fan blogs and fan fiction. And Mark seems like to like her too. He keeps fondling carrots.
P1 – Ok, I’ll tell Mark he has to strap on. We could get a spin-off from this. (Turns to leave but then stops) Uh, Mark knows he’s a dude right?
Raul – how many episodes are left after Agnes? Do I have to watch them all or could I skip to the family and finale?
Well, Mr. Lousy – and Joni – you already know that the series is a wildly mixed bag. I initially felt that the show should’ve hewn more closely to the reality shows it parodies, especially in terms of characters, but in retrospect, I think the parody wouldn’t work because the participants in the real thing, primarily the women, are so horrible that they really can’t kick it up a notch. It’s already as unpleasant, shrill, and insulting as it can get.
Instead, they toss in misfits who would never have qualified for the show and run with that.
The characters who might have actually appeared on a real reality show did get exaggerated: Lexi the stalker and Kristen Bell as the fundamentalist Christian, but they also got the boot earlier on because I don’t believe that Oyama could have taken them much further. You can already see their prototypes on The Soup, and there isn’t that much difference.
TITI could be dropped into one of those real shows without making much of a splash. The conflagration of her name and her breasts was her main joke, and they relied on that for too long. However, it was worth keeping her on so that we could meet her family! The performance by Brian George as her father was priceless, but still not good enough to make me watch him in a recurring role on The Big Bang Theory.
Really, most of the other characters really had one joke to fall back on as well. I thought Carly being a lesbian wasn’t that funny, but then we got to meet her mother – family episode! – and she did have one spectacular rejection and subsequent exit. And while the character grew rather stale rather quickly, the actress and her marvelously malleable face made her more watchable and sympathetic.
Other characters/actresses did have some great moments. Agnes, the “cougar” of the bunch, had some sterling moments during the hose handouts. She is ON all the time. Just watch her!
Haley, the pantsless skank, may have also been a little closer to some real contestants, though her ejection from the show and her reaction to said ejection were quite funny. Her motivation for being on the show, revealed when she gets booted, was the only one that made any sense to me.
I guess the homeless woman needed shelter, so she just wanted inside. I found her character somewhat unfunny. I think they were having too hard a laugh at homeless people, though there was some bite to having her lose out in the episode where they construct a Habit-for-Humanity-like home for the homeless.
The woman with the monkey heart may have been the most outrageous, and therefore to me one of the funniest. There were numerous gags and quick lines about her monkey heart that really had me guffawing, especially since they played it so straight.
The actress who I think they underutilized the most was June Diane Rafael, who played Julie, who at one point said that if she didn’t get the hose she would throw herself off the balcony. She didn’t really have an identifying eccentricity/quality other than goofiness/desperation, which pours out of her giant, gorgeous, goofy eyes. She was on the last two episodes of Party Down as Ken Marino’s possible new sweetheart – and affable pothead. She’s got something on Funny or Die that I need to watch because I think she’s funny just walking into frame.
I really liked that they saved their most damaging ammo for Annie, the sweet, normal one – because she is the biggest idiot of them all for going on the show: She should know better. She even muses aloud when Haley is booted that the premise makes no sense: all the ladies compete to sleep with one guy and aren’t allowed to date/sleep with anyone else, but he’s there to sleep with anyone, and as a mandate, date all of them.
And Ken Marino gets funnier as the show progresses. Mark is so thoughtless and stupid that he becomes the brunt of the jokes as much as the ladies. Yet Ken Marino is perfect for the role because he has a likability factor that’s hard to quash, even as his idiocy becomes egregious.
Plus I think it was Ken Marino responsible for assembling the talent, so I have to throw my arms open for that. He really got some great comic performances from people who he’s worked with all over the place in the past. It felt like an ensemble that may have been slumming a bit, but were also stretching in terms of performance and maybe improv.
So should Mr. Lousy watch the show? Yeah. You already know it’s hit-and-miss, but there are some hits that you shouldn’t miss: the family episode, the exercise trainer episode, and the finale. The others have their moments. I thought they could have done away with the penultimate episode that wasted Kerri Kenny-Silver (Reno 911!) as a lovelorn firefighter.
Also, what Mr. Lousy reminded me of – the Bachelor genre is so degrading to women that the parody did its best by making a man the winner. Only a man can possibly come out of this shit truly a winner, even if he’s in an ill-fitting gown and a ridiculous blonde wig.