Wife and I thought The Next Joe Millionaire would be terrible. Said we weren’t going to watch what we perceived would be a lame sequel. How could Joe Millionaire’s follow-up season be anything like the first season? Surprisingly though, we couldn’t resist when it showed up in the TiVO listing.

And now, after watching Monday night’s debut episode our opinions have changed, albeit slightly. Now we just might have to blame it on our son who TiVo’d it for us.

Fox went and roped in an $11,000 a year cowboy named David Smith and an attractive group of European ladies for the dupe that he’s worth 80 million bones. Some of the high points of the first episode (Warning: SPOILERS ahead!):

- where the distinguished Paul the Butler tells David to call him Paul and not “sir” and the cowboy has trouble wrangling that concept.
- the European ladies over-indulge in champagne and like to stay up late and sleep in late
- a humorous exchange about what a rodeo is: “A festival of horses” and an enigmatic and yet oddly satisfying comparison to Charlie’s Angels.
- David not being able to sleep when he found out that he got to pick out his horse that he would ride in on — and no, cowboys don’t ride in on white stallions, they enter via the help of a palamino named Hurricane.
- Hurricane, like Mister Ed, is a central character
- according to previews of future installments, the cowboy will be reduced to tears and be bleeped and asterisked out (***!) in the subtitles department.
- when told their potential suitor was a cowboy the look of disgust was the complete opposite of when they were told he was worth $80 million

Ok, so reality TV has had its ups and downs. Mostly downs lately, but Joe 2 shows some promise after episode one. If I was a European lady, I’d be somewhat insulted that Fox thinks that they could pull this scam on them, but that’s part of the “fun”, I guess, in this runner-up season. It is kind of cruel and disparaging though. I find it a bit hard to believe, though, that these ladies had never heard of the show Joe Millionaire. Maybe I’m just totally over-estimating the success of the first season. We’ll see if this cowboy rides this one to a satisfying conclusion, or if he gets bucked prematurely from our lineup. Grade B-

Articles about The Next Joe Millionaire:
Next Joe Millionaire reaches 6.8 million compared to last season finale of 33 million

More blogging on Joe Millionaire 2:
- Dale admits he watched it
- Indepundit calls the women “Euro trash”, “gold-digging” and says he’ll “enjoy watching them suffer”
- Fresh potatoes notes that the cowboy seemed more comfortable with Hurrican than the “Eurotrash models”
- “More than sluts with accents”
- Mikey thinks they are just a bunch of “whiny drunks”
- Chris points out that preliminary ratings suggest that Joe came in 5th last night
- divadiversion not too sure about the women chosen
- “David Smith, is absolutely adorable” (pictures of him and the women)

Did this post make you go hmm?

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