Love Cruise: Ship of Fools

As you can probably imagine, in the palatial offices of RealityNewsOnline, virtually every reality show gets discussed, and it seems if the show is really good, it gets a lot of attention. If it’s really bad, it gets a lot more attention.

Which is why we all had a collective epiphany – a forehead slapping moment, if you will. There was Toni – Toni of the bug-eyed fury in those memorably misleading Love Cruise commercials, on Paradise Hotel. And, in seeing Toni, someone wondered aloud how she could have possibly escaped the Reality TV Hall of Shame. How the whole damn show escaped the Hall of Shame! Answer: The Hall of Shame didn’t exist then.

But that’s no reason to deny induction, is it?

Let’s take a look back at the nonsense. Love Cruise was supposed to be the antidote until another round of shameless camera hogs could be gathered for Temptation Island 2. So, Fox, in the desperate era before American Idol, rustled up a fresh batch of shameless camera hogs, dumped them on a boat, and let the cameras roll. Ready? Fight!

The rules for Love Cruise were simple: simply indecipherable. The object was to be voted the winning couple by the other people on the boat, and you get a trip around the world (where? Around the world! What, you wanted details, like countries and stuff? This is Fox!). But, you could be voted off the boat for whatever reason, and lose your opportunity to couple. You were sent to the ubiquitous Loser Island (which we later found out was Aruba. And, if you can’t find a way to have a good time on Aruba, you are, in fact, a loser). There was this nonsense with a Switch Card, which could be used by the winner of the Card to save someone headed to Loser Island. But, why bother? Suddenly, you could come back from Loser Island! Whole couples were suddenly in the finals when they had been eliminated eons prior! It was all so hard to watch. It was awhile ago. I’ll try to refresh your repressed memory:

There was Adrian the chauvinist, Lisa the insecure, Anthony the jerk, Toni the annoying and domineering cow (and seeing her on Paradise Hotel, nothing has changed), Greg the enigma... or aloof, Melissa the party-girl, Laura the resident spicy tomato, Jeannette who was just out-of-place, Andrea the blabber mouth, and Michael the sad sack. I’m sure I missed some people, but I think you get the gist.

The possibility of finding love on this cruise of carnivores went from slim to none in no time. The couples quickly aligned for strategy, usually with people who didn’t feel an iota of attraction for each other, let alone fall in love. Lisa found herself odd woman out for playing the game straight. She quickly shot to the other side of distaste by behaving in a brazen sort of way with a number of men to get attention. The word is pathetic.

Toni never convinced us she was interested in finding romance with anyone, despite her protestations. But, Toni is prone to lie. Who could possibly forget her making a deal with Jeannette to split the cash prize money (on camera) and then loudly denying it when the rest of the shipmates got wind of the plan. She denied it so well, I was beginning to think I imagined it! Of course, Jeannette wasn’t used to dealing with this breed of barracuda and could only cry in frustration.

And Anthony. Anthony single-handedly embodied every single woman’s worst nightmare. Anthony thought he was smooth enough to score any woman he wanted. He said he always had. Yet when we saw him ply his trade, if you will, it was quite laughable. When Laura wouldn’t give in to his charms (in other words, she wouldn’t put out to the slimeball), he quickly went after the vulnerable Lisa, who looked like easy pickings. Lisa managed to gather what vestiges of a self-esteem she had left and said no as well. But she was fine with aligning with him and putting on the appearance that something was going on. For Anthony, that was all well and good, but he was horny. He proceeded to lay his tired rap on virtually every woman on the ship, blowing the illusion in the process. In the end, he was bitter and blue-balled.

Adrian was the life of the party, but don’t expect him at any Roe vs. Wade rallies. Greg, who it seemed took four weeks to get any real camera time, smiled a lot. He ended up in Toni’s clutches, and she loudly proclaimed that he was the perfect guy for her. No one believed that he cared for her any more than he would a pet chinchilla, and Toni sold a little drama that she loved him more than he loved her. Yeah, yeah.

Michael knew that he would never have a chance with any of these women in his real life, so his definition of charm was something along the lines of, “you don’t want to hang out with me, do ya?” The answer was usually no. So, Michael went into strategy mode. It ended up blowing his shot at the person he seemed most compatible with... Lisa. She was bitter by then, anyway. Oh, and there was Andrea who never met a secret she could keep.

Are you remembering now?

The world remains captivated to see if Ryan and Trista are actually gonna get married. If Andrew and Jen will ride off into the sunset on a fresh set of Firestones. There were no such questions for Love Cruise. The only lingering question would be whether the lovely yacht would hit an iceberg and send the whole lot of shallow, scheming, conniving, backstabbing, hard-playing, lie-telling, alliance-blabbing monsters into the cold blue sea and save the world of the possibility of them spawning.

Inexplicably, there was no believable romance out of this whole cast of attractive (physically) people. Rules seemed to come and go at the whim of a producer. After the finale (more like a relief), I remember saying out loud, “Did I really just watch this whole thing?” Well, I did. It will rank high on my list of regrets.

Sometimes, reality shows can be exciting (Amazing Race), informative (Tough Enough), emotionally involving (Big Brother) or just plain entertaining (American Idol). Good shows can fall into multiple categories. Love Cruise managed to do none of the above. None.

And that is why Love Cruise and all of its hapless inhabitants – including Toni, who has now found a new opportunity to ply her trade – are in the Reality TV Hall of Shame. Welcome aboard.

Sting7 can be reached at stingseven@yahoo.com.

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