More To Love Still Together

More To Love Still Together

Did you watch More To Love? Brought to you by the man who offered us The Bachelor, wily producer Mike Fleiss, More To Love gave us Luke Conley, a 26 year-old husky fella, who’ll be winnowing down a passel of plus-size gals. I’ve watched The Bachelor occasionally, am no great follower of dating-genre TV, so ended up I liking More To Love on its own goofy, summer-vacation level. Luke isn’t smarmy. He’s a bit of a salesman (he does something in real estate, so he probably can’t help it), but one key to staying with a show like this is rooting for the person doing the picking, and so far, I’d like to see Luke fall for a nice person.

But who? More To Love allowed its bevy of women to emerge from cars with their weight in pounds printed below their names, a tacky touch, but then, what did I expect, In Treatment? Some of them seemed a little bitter (wondered one bluntly, why do guys “love the skinny bitches?”), some a tad sad (a woman who proclaimed she’d “never had a second date”). Did you watch More To Love? Do you think it handles its premise well, or that it exploits or condescends to its love-hungry contestants?

More To Love suffers from the usual garish visual tropes: the arrival of the contestants, the awkward kissy-huggy greetings, the settling in to a house that looks as though it was decorated by Lady Ga-Ga’s fussy chihuahua. One dull spot last night: Emme, the famous plus-size model, doesn’t add much as host, or at least she didn’t in the premiere, seeming awkward and maybe a tad nervous. I’ve seen her in interviews where she comes off smart and funny, so perhaps she’ll settle in. Anyway, she can’t be a worse presenter than, say, the shrill toothpick they hired for Top Chef Masters, right?