And your 15 minutes of fame has been extended until... forever.

Ok, so keeping with Tuesday’s theme of reality TV, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Bachelor lately. As I said on Tuesday, I only like fake scripted reality. I’m not that into competition/dating shows (excluding Project Runway, which I am convinced is going to be totally ruined by moving to California, but only time will tell). I have only seen The Bachelor a handful of times in my life. And I get it. I get the attraction to shows like that. They’re addictive. Once you know the characters you just can’t wait to see the drama and who wins and who loses and blah blah blah. I just don’t have the time in my very busy TV-watching schedule to add in shows like that. I don’t like them enough and they are not worth my time.

But lets get something straight about Reality TV and it’s stars – these people are hungry for fame. This isn’t fucking 1998 where struggling actors go on Real World because they think it’s going to help their acting career. For the most part, I’m going to say about 98% of Reality TV stars never make it outside of the realm of Reality TV. And going further, 95% of them never appear on television again. And it always comes as some big surprise on these dating shows when the main person finds out their potential love interest has been on another dating show. GASP! You’re all fame hungry fools who will do anything to get on camera.

When people bring up everything that happened on The Bachelor this year my standard response is “DON’T CARE” but since I’m writing about it now, I guess I care a little. For those of you who have been living under a rock the past few months, let me fill you in with a Spewing-Nonsense-abridged version: The Bachelor was down to his final 2 girls. He chose Melissa. He proposed to Melissa On the reunion show, he decided to dump his fiancé and choose the girl who he had previously discarded in the final elimination. Aaaaaaand scene. If you watch the show and I got something in there wrong, please feel free to correct me, because I only know any of this because someone felt it necessary to take the time to explain it to me, and every major/minor gossip/news show talked about it non-stop for about a month.

So this girl who got dumped, does anyone else realize she got what she wanted? Even my beloved Chelsea Handler went off on a tirade a few weeks ago saying “good for her” about Melissa, because apparently she has recovered from this heinous tragedy and is now going to be on Dancing With the Stars. It may not have been her master plan to be dumped on national television, but she did go on one reality show and now she is going to be on another one. This is how people make money. This is now her career. Do you people think Ryan and Trista had their wedding televised for their health? I don’t think so. ABC paid them $1 million for that shit.

There is no question that getting dumped was definitely the best plausible scenario for Melissa’s career. If she really gave a shit she’d pull a Zora (of Joe Millionaire, best dating show in the history of dating shows). Pulling a “Zora” entails being really awkward on camera because you’re not used to a camera following you around all the time and you don’t really like it and also realizing you don’t want your life to be televised. Zora and Joe Millionaire (who I lovingly refer to as Joey Mills), aka Evan Marriot, did not stay together. It was perfect. It’s not like they admitted the show was fake but they just didn’t end up liking each other. It was a bizarrely honest ending to a show that was all about lying. Whatever, it happens. They split half a million dollars at the end so it’s not like anyone walked away empty-handed. Zora went on to a life of semi-normalcy, and became the spokeswoman for NutriSystem at some point. Who knows where Evan Marriot went, probably back to the construction site the Fox producers plucked him out of in the first place. Zora and Evan were the last of their kind in the world of Reality Television.

So when someone brings up The Bachelor, which they inevitably will in the not-so-distant future, do not shed a tear over poor Melissa being dumped on TV, give that girl a mental high five for making buckets of money and extending her 15 minutes of fame to two nights a week in YOUR living room BECAUSE she got dumped on TV. It’s a trade-off, yes, but I think she’ll be OK.