To the untrained eye “MILF Manor” is nothing more than an unsophisticated heap of reality TV that can be added to the trash pile of programs produced by TLC. One may think its main purpose is simply to continue milking the bottomless cash cow that is villa-based dating shows. “Why would I want to watch this?” you might ask yourself. “Why would anyone want to watch this? Oh God, please make it stop.” This would be a perfectly understandable reaction if “MILF Manor” had not accidentally created the perfect formula for a dating show. “MILF Manor” is to reality TV what the golden ratio is to art.
The premise of the show is simple: eight hot moms are sent to a villa in Mexico to date eight hunky young men under the delusion that they might find the love of their life. At this point, it’s all very standard. The only thing that separates it from the likes of “Love Island” or “Bachelor in Paradise” is the fact that the women are older than the men. The viewer may be thinking, “Okay sure, there might be something interesting here,” but maybe they’re not yet entirely convinced. That is, until the twist of the show is revealed, and there is absolutely no turning back.
The moms are all lined up expecting to be greeted by a squad of factory produced, protein powder men from the planet Gymussharkus. The hope is that half of them will be personal trainers and the other half male models. But instead, they’re met with eight slightly disheveled and very confused looking boys — who all also happen to be their sons. Now, obviously everyone is told to act surprised with cries of, “Oh Jimmy, what are you doing here?” and “Mom! Is that you?” but it’s very clear that this mother-son dating situation was pre-arranged. Unfortunately, this element of consent does nothing in the way of soothing the viewer’s concern. In fact, knowing that this was agreed to adds a whole new level of discomfort to the show.
After the full premise is aired out, everything immediately descends into a nightmarish spiral and the viewer is left with the classic ‘must look away, can’t look away’ conflict. Firstly, each MILF-son duo is forced to share an unnecessarily sexy bedroom together, complete with a personal hot tub. This set-up allows the viewer to wrestle with the age-old question of whether it would be worse to be cockblocked by one’s mother or one’s son. The nightmare delves even deeper as the contestants are required to participate in a game that wields the threat of accidental incest a little too nonchalantly. The show could have eased you in, but no, there’s no time for ease in MILF Manor, just instant chest rubbing.
What was once considered nothing more than background viewing now has one fully engrossed in the worst way possible; it’s like picking at a scab. The clan of characters who put themselves in this less-than-ideal situation produce nothing but an endless stream of TV comedy gold, such as when 26-year-old Jimmy boldly declares that he would like to paint one of the mom’s toenails and then “suck the acrylic off the toes.” A moment of silence for that line. “MILF Manor” also gives audiences one of the most sinister characters to ever grace the television screen in the form of 51-year-old Kelle Mortensen from Orange County, aka Disco Mammi. Every other word that comes out of this woman’s mouth is eye-twitchingly obscene. To this day, her aggressively botoxed face surely appears in the fever dreams of many viewers.
Besides the awkward dates and creepy challenges, the real reason why “MILF Manor” is a nearly perfect reality TV show is because the concept is so horrendous that nothing extra must be done to make it more entertaining. During “Love Island” the producers are constantly scrambling to make things more dramatic by eliminating contestants and adding new ones — they even move half the people to a new house in the middle of the season. But in the case of “MILF Manor,” its premise self-sufficiently incites drama because everyone is eternally uncomfortable. On the one occasion when the producers do intervene by eliminating one mother-son pair and bringing in a new one, it changes absolutely nothing.
The truth of the show is that the contestants have no real goal or motivation; there’s no weekly rose ceremony or ever-present threat of elimination. It’s very short and the season finale is anti-climactic and ambiguous because the ending simply doesn’t matter. The purpose of the program lies in the fact the producers were able to find enough people who were willing to play along with the rules of this strange sub-reality, essentially just for the sake of it. Perhaps it should never have been created, but it has set a new precedent for reality TV, so that future dating shows will have to match the same level of absurdity to be even remotely intriguing. Don’t be fooled by Rotten Tomatoes’ rating of 14%, they clearly don’t know high art when they see it.
