'Joe Millionaire,' 
too clever by half

First Fox tricks the women, now the viewers. Bad. 

By Dan Jewel

   Fox managed to hit a new low this week. Not low in the sleazy sense. I’m all for sleaze—it’s the reason the Fox network exists, as this Sunday’s “Married With Children” reunion special reminds us.
   But this past Monday, on the penultimate installment of the unreality series “Joe Millionaire,” we got an hour-long clip show. The episode had been promoted as the one in which “Joe”—Evan Marriott, for whom the word lunkhead appears to have been invented—would choose between former fetish queen Sarah and antisocial substitute teacher Zora. When that didn’t happen, viewers (there were a staggering 24 million of ‘em) went berserk. 
   On Fox online bulletin boards, posters declared their intentions to boycott the two-hour finale, airing this coming Monday, Feb. 17. 
   The network, they noted, had betrayed their trust. (Trust? Have they ever watched Fox before?)
   I must say, without feeling particularly clever, that I assumed all along that the episode would end with Evan about to choose. After all, they need to reel in the maximum number of viewers for the finale, and a cliffhanger is a guarantee. 
   So I didn’t feel especially betrayed by that move. But the show was infuriating for another reason: It contained approximately four minutes of new material buried beneath an hour of flashbacks.
   The clip show, of course, is a time-honored TV time-filler on sitcoms and dramas, a way to give the writers a week off without resorting to a rerun. 
   But “Joe Millionaire” doesn’t have writers. And it was only the sixth episode. Showing an hour-long recap assumes an awfully short memory on the part of viewers. 
   I won’t pretend that I’ll join the boycotters next week. I’ve been a “Joe Millionaire” junkie. The premise—a bevy of women compete for a man they believe to be worth $50 million, when he is, as he repeats ad nauseam on every episode, “a $19,000-a-year construction worker”—is wonderfully cruel. 
   The women have been appropriately catty, except for sweet, awkward Zora, who seems jarringly out-of-place. The butler, Paul Hogan (not to be confused with Crocodile Dundee), has made a terrifically dry master of ceremonies (though the occasional appearance of a “host,” Alex McLeod, has been baffling). 
    And I can’t imagine too many fans of this guilty pleasure honestly resisting the finale, no matter how annoyed they are.
    But Fox should beware. If the final episode features two hours of filler, people will be fuming—and that could be a problem. They’ve got “Married by America” and a seemingly infinite supply of additional reality shows coming up—as does every other network.
   When it comes time to choose which ones to watch next, viewers might not have such short memories after all.

February 14, 2003© 2003 Media Life

-Dan Jewel is a senior editor at Biography Magazine in New York and a frequent contributor to Media Life.


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