The Will’s Penny: Nobody Else Deserves It More

CBS’s The Will only made it through one episode before being cancelled (though that one episode was actually a 90-minute combination of the first two as filmed). However, in just that short period, it became clear that one of the contestants was headed straight for a full induction into the Reality TV Hall of Shame.

The Will is based on the premise that Bill Long, a rich guy, is giving away part of his estate – his beloved ranch – according to the outcome of the competition. Among those competing were his current (fourth) wife, Penny, and his only son (from his third wife), Billy.

Penny immediately showed up on the Hall of Shame judges’ radar screen. Under normal circumstances, we would wait until a contestant’s entire time on a show has been played out before actually inducting them to the Hall. However, it is unclear if we will ever see more than the first episode, sources inside the show’s production have told RealityNewsOnline that Penny only got worse as the show progressed, and there is more than enough to get her into the Hall of Shame already. Therefore, the induction will go on!

It became obvious within the first few minutes just what kind of person we were dealing with in Penny. We heard of how Penny married Bill and proceeded to tell Billy, his eighth-grade son, that he was worthless and not part of the family. What kind of a person says that to anybody, let alone a kid? Ah, but Penny has an excuse, it seems. She claims that when Billy was 11, he talked about wanting to spend his father’s money after he died. Even if we presume she is telling the truth (and, as we’ll later see, that might not be the case at all), he was 11! While Penny might not have matured any since that age, most people do. Yet she continues to hold against him that alleged statement from when he was a kid, and to use it to try to turn other people against him.

If we can do a little amateur psychoanalyzing, it seems that Penny has something of an obsession about getting what she believes she deserves. In the first few moments of The Will, she told viewers that when she wants something, she stops at nothing to get it. She added, “Bill’s money’s rightfully mine. I paid my dues. I put in my time. It’s not his, it’s not mine, it’s ours. Nobody else deserves it.” This attitude of doing whatever it takes to mark her territory could explain the way she treated Billy in the past. He, after all, was Bill’s only son, and a threat to inherit some or all of what Penny saw as “rightfully” hers. It reminds me of one of those animal shows where a new leader takes over the pack and kills the children of the old leader in order to establish dominance.

No, Penny didn’t kill anybody. But she took plenty of other actions against Billy. In fact, her main goal on the show seemed to be to knock the boy out of the running, and she would do anything to accomplish that. She bragged that she is an excellent manipulator who does it in her business and personal life, “with my family, with my friends…” You have to wonder if her business associates, customers, employees, friends, and family not on the show were sitting there watching and wondering just how she had been manipulating them. Of course, we found out further that she knows exactly how to manipulate husband Bill, which she bragged about as well.

In any case, she began her manipulation by encouraging her employee/son’s ex-girlfriend Kristin that she should “prostitute herself” to get Bill’s friend Mickey over to their side so he won’t support Billy. It continued as she convinced Billy’s friend Josh to make a deal with her during the first challenge – a deal she immediately set about trying to break.

Most of Penny’s manipulation was of the emotional sort, and she didn’t seem to care if she appeared to the viewers as a raging hypocrite. For example, as we just mentioned above, Penny plotted to avoid living up to the agreement she’d made with Josh, but then complained that Danielle had stabbed her in the back when she did the right thing by keeping Billy around. She further verbally attacked Josh and accused him of not living up to his end of their deal when, in fact, he fully intended to do so and it was Bad Penny herself who had tried to avoid it.

Other hypocrisy and manipulation targeted at Billy occurred when Penny claimed that Billy is a lying, patronizing fake who would tell anybody what they want to hear – right after she told us that knows exactly what to tell Bill to get the advantage from him and after she admitted to manipulating everybody. And the kicker, of course, was when Penny stormed into the boys’ room and threw her wine on Billy while saying he had no class.

But Penny didn’t just manipulate the ones she hates – she also manipulated the ones she professed to love. No, I’m not even talking about husband Bill here, but rather son Ashley. When Ashley made the extremely difficult decision between keeping Kristin in the game or doing what his mother wanted – of course coming down on the side of Mom – Penny couldn’t resist the opportunity to rub it in, noting to him that Kristin was crying because of him and Kristin loves him so much.

But wait, there’s more! Not only was Penny a manipulating bitch and a hypocrite, she was a whiner too! When the ranch challenge was explained, Penny complained that it wasn’t a fair test because only Josh and Billy had done ranch chores. To viewers, it sounded like a perfectly fair test to find out who should win the ranch!

Then, after she was given a full minute’s head start and still came in dead last with her team on the ranch challenge, she announced for all to hear that it wasn’t a fair test, that it was rigged, wah wah wah. And she followed this performance up by refusing to attend (or let anybody else in her group attend) the Protected Heir Dinner.

Ironically, Penny came into The Will with the best possible position. As Bill’s wife, she was likely to get more advantages than anybody else. But more importantly, she brought in her own ready-made alliance of her family (mother, brother, son) and employees. With the way people were sent packing according to the last person standing after “the chain” had picked everybody else, it would have been a simple matter of time – unless they lost an inordinate percentage of the challenges – before she and her partners could whittle away the other players. We don’t know what happened as far as the competition, but even if she won the ranch, Penny looked like a loser overall.

Penny seemed to be on The Will to get what she deserves. To hold with that idea, the Reality TV Hall of Shame is giving her exactly what she deserves –a full induction!

David Bloomberg is the Editor of the Reality TV Hall of Shame, and can be reached at RNO@pobox.com.

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