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Thursday, October 23, 2003 Idiot Box Savant: Eurobabes, meet...a hick
By Andrew Kiraly
Halloween at the Savant household is in serious jeopardy of total fuck-all derailment. I don't know why, but as soon as I hit that two-week penumbra before Halloween, it's like some sugar goblin hijacks my pancreas and I start forcing myself all over the Sharing Is Good Candy Hoard like a drunk boss at the office party dry-humping the secretary pool. Last night I woke up on the couch at 3 a.m., face moustached with chocolate, a bunch of empty Snickers Cruncher wrappers clenched in either fist, mocking the very heavens with my immodesty. I had no idea of the depths of my dissipation until I went to the bathroom and actually peed chocolate milk. Shameful. As Rush Limbaugh so often says to the cracked mirror reflecting his distorted visage and, behind it on the hotel bed, also to the unconscious crack whore and box of chocolate crullers, "What's...happening to me?" So, kids of the howling northwest outlands, sorry in advance for giving you canned olives again this Halloween. I sure didn't eat anything during Monday night's premiere of "The Next Joe Millionaire: An International Affair" (Fox, Mondays, 8 p.m.). I was too busy chewing my palm as I watched a U.N. tent-pitching force of pure Eurosizzle parade across my screen. Yeah, the premise of the new prog is the same as the old pseudo-rich mookboy meets a passel of women with varying degrees of grade-school achievement--'cept this time, the study in contrasts is even more dramatic. Bachelor David Smith is a real cowboy who actually earns $11,000 a year as a rodeo clown (nongay variety, presumably), and he's being courted by a dozen-odd Old World mamma jammas who, thanks to harsh European cigarettes and crunching on all those hard-edged English syllables, sound even more masculine than him. Whoa, one puberty is enough, ladies--save some for the rest of the world. The fun this time around will surely lie in the vast cultural gap that howls between David and the ladies. He's simple, earnest, gritty, likes farm animals in a way that doesn't involve a pay website; they're poised, worldly and have that maddening European power of turning smoking into a lungtastic fashion statement. With those factors in place, you have to wonder if the Prince Charming myth--the plush cultural fulcrum on which this show balances--will have as much currency in this "international" series. After all, a necessary ingredient for any self-respecting love vs. money reality show is a generous serving of naivete, or at least contestants with willingness to lie to themselves, and that's one thing these Eurohotties, refreshingly, lack. (That and silicon. The Berlin wall has fallen. Swedish wobblers for everyone!) David's intro hinted at this complication. With the ladies filed out front of his Tuscan palazzo, he trotted up on a dun Palomino, complete with hat and jeans (David, not the horse). Cue the violin music and soft-focus camera as David rides through the gates...pan across chorus line of skirted and sunglassed Eurobabes as they...as they...look David up and down like an exhibit in the Museum of Total Gayness. Yeah, how anticlimactic. Cowmook haymouthed robotically through his greetings, and the chic brigade listened as intently as though he were a commercial for women's razors. As he turned his horse around to ride into the sunset, one girl bleated, "David, why do you go? You stay and have fun with us!" The whole thing capped off a bunch of earlier, quite frank admissions by the ladies that, yez, I want zee money, what eez wrong with zat? See, Europeans aren't all freaky and conflicted about money like we are. Money isn't loaded down with all this Judeo-Christian passive-aggressive guilt bullshit about rich men having to sew a camel's ass shut with a needle to get into heaven. I mean, the European Union's willingness to paint their currency fruity colors is the best indicator that it doesn't take it all that seriously. So when the lucky finalist discovers that David is a poor, uneducated rube and not a rich, uneducated rube, the fur's really gonna fly--and it won't be from Eurobabe's armpits, either. Lint roller at the ready. Bring it!
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