i feel guilty having watched. i feel guilty having enjoyed. and i feel especially guilty for admitting this, but i thought the last 30 minutes of Average Joe: Fiji or American Samoa or whatever were pretty awesome. reluctant to watch at first, when i realized what was on NBC i went through about 5 minutes of anxiously changing channels back and forth so as to fool myself into believing that i wasn't really watching Average Joe: 2, i was in fact watching television in the broadest and least committed sense of that phrase. well, after five minutes i gave up and wallowed. i feel sort of dirty for having watched a show whose premise is to throw a bunch of ordinary (if interesting) slobs into competition against some (utterly uninteresting) slabs of meat for the chance at a girl that is obviously out of their (the slobs') league.

for those of you unfamiliar with the central characters of this particular iteration of the AJ drama they were:
Larissa: underwear model or something.
Brian: horribly accented BoSox fan, normal looking, sensitive guy
Gil: attractive robot with the soul of a plank

now Brian had plenty of faults. i'll give you that. he gets a bad case of ratface when he smiles and loves the Red Sox so much i want to kick him in the nuts. and his accent makes me want to put someone or some thing to the torch, but with the pool boiled down to two contestants (one of whom may or may not have been a robot), he was the obvious fan favorite to win. but in the end, with some forced tears and some perfunctory "letting him down easy", it turns out that Larissa chose... Gil! that's right! Mr. Personality, you are the winner! Mr. 28 Year Old Contractor Who Wants to Be an Actor, come on doooown!

but wait! there's a twist! Larissa was holding something back! some deep dark secret that was the show's FINAL TWIST! What could it be?! and on a stormy walk on the beach, with a catch in her voice Larissa revealed to Gil that... (bum bum bummmmm) Fabio is her EX-boyfriend!

Jeff to himself: "...that's it? that's the twist?"

well, despite the stupid nature of the "twist" it turns out that dating a girl who used to date Fabio was too much for ol' Gil to handle. after some sullen wave kicking and weird lines like "any red-blooded American male knows exactly how I feel," Gil jilted Larissa in Cabo. The End.

for those of you who haven't heard this from me before, i have contended since day one that the actual execution of the show, Average Joe, is entirely superfluous, because the tacit question posed by the social engineers of the show ("Will an attractive woman choose an interesting but less-attractive man or an attractive man with the soul/personality of a wet dishrag?") has an answer so patently obvious that even asking the question essentially begs the question. it is my contention that the correct response to this question is no. period. in the contest of hot guy versus not hot guy for the attentions of a girl, the hot guy will win 100 times out of 100. i am not criticizing. i am just saying: that's the way it is. and really, i don't object to this. i do however, object to the show's engineers setting us up to root for a little guy who will never, ever in a thousand million years (or until he is the hottest guy left on the planet) win.

but despite being proven right, the show's ending made so little sense, i couldn't do anything but laugh. and when, during her obligatory "it's ironic that i spent my time rejecting all those guys but i was the one to get rejected" speech i kept on laughing i knew right then that i'd probably lost what was left of my compassion for my fellow man. but in the final analysis, despite being set up for disappointment and proven horribly right, i still got a good laugh out of how quickly the choice of the idiot hot guy backfired. and if there is somehow an AJ:3 created, i'll probably skip it. until the last episode, anyway. dude, she used to date Fabio. am i the only person who finds this riotously funny?