When it comes to reality television, the shit floats to the top. Enter TLC’s psychological experiment MILF Manor. If you saw 30 Rock, you probably know where this is going: Eight women in the sweet spot of MILF-hood (40 to 60 years old) show up for a mystical Mexican getaway in search of love. The twist? Their suitors, unbeknownst to them prior to their arrival, are one another’s sons! And over the course of the show’s nine episodes, high jinks, jealousy, fetishes, and Oedipal complexes rear their ugly heads, with every scene devolving further and further into the dregs of the human psyche. It was the worst thing I saw this year, and also, as with a trainwreck, I could not look away.
If the morally bankrupt extremes of mother-son bonding are not so much your thing (understood), get the highlights — or lowlights — with the eight worst things this show had to offer: one for each MILF.
8.
Jimmy Loves Feet (Episode One)
When I asked a bunch of my friends about the scene that made them turn off MILF Manor, they all mentioned this one, which about toward the end of the first episode. The day after the MILFs and sons meet for the first time, Jimmy, the lovable goofball of the group, mentions he has a thing for Latina baddie Pola. She, of course, is beautiful, but it’s not Pola’s good looks or maternal personality that captivates Jimmy. It’s … her feet, which Jimmy talks about in stunningly deep detail. Among the various foot-related acts he recites to the camera, the phrasing of his wish to “suck the acrylic off them toes†is perhaps the most egregious. If that weren’t enough, later in the season he talks, in detail, about how he got pink eye from eating ass. Not to kink shame, but some things should maybe be kept to ourselves!
7.
Abs Feel-Up Contest (Episode One)
The first episode of MILF Manor pulls no punches, containing what I can only describe as a light groping contest in which mothers are blindfolded and have to feel the abs of the men to recognize their son. Whether it’s the fault of the edit or the task itself, the contest yields a lot of audience discomfort. Shannan audibly moans after asking, “Who’s ready for a checkup at the doctor’s office?†Kelle, after feeling up Jimmy’s abs, yells, “I wanted you to be my son!†And Joey, in a confessional, remarks on the situation to his mom by saying, almost dejectedly, “you’ve never rubbed me up and down.†Weird all around.
6.
Joey Needs the Milk (Episode Two)
Joey is one of the strangest “characters†this show has to offer. He’s a 20-year-old budding real-estate agent and bartender. His voice has an affectation that’s half-Blaccent, half-toddler, and in both actions and appearance he gives a vibe of having been breastfed for half of his life. In fact, Joey and Kelle, his biological mother, have a conversation in the confessional about that exact topic. In an exchange that has stuck with me since I watched this show nearly a full year ago, Joey uses strange euphemisms to describe his mom’s massive knockers, to which Kelle, in typically graceful fashion, responds, “It didn’t bother you when you were a baby sucking on them either, so …†Joey then doubles down, because of course he does, remarking that he “needed the milk!â€
5.
Charlene’s Speed Dating (Episode Four)
Of all the MILFs, Charlene is perhaps the most interesting. A bona fide Jersey mom, she is given almost an underdog edit in the first few episodes — right from her introduction, the other MILFs begin to rag on her appearance in confessionals, and Charlene spends most of her scenes as an outsider looking in, desperately trying to click with the group of younger men. In episode four, a speed-dating challenge prompts the manor residents to get to know anyone they haven’t met before. Charlene immediately gets to the point: “Are you good in bed?†“How important is that big booty?†“Are you a butt man?†etc., etc. The questions, though, do not land appropriately, reframing Charlene not as an underdog but a woman making the other residents uncomfortable with her borderline sexual harassment. Unfortunately, the self-professed “queen of blue balls†and her son, Harrison, were removed from the show a few episodes later for not getting any matches, freeing the other men from more awkward propositioning.
4.
Underwear Selection (Episode Seven)
You may be seeing a trend here where the challenges are directly designed to bring out the most incestuous undertones. The last challenge, before the MILF and suitor pairs are confirmed, is for the mothers and sons to “identify the most pieces of each other’s dirty laundry.†As Jimmy rightly points out, “You shouldn’t know your mom’s underwear,†but that doesn’t stop the boys from rifling through a pile of bras and panties. In some cases, it’s a non-issue, like Jose knowing what his mom’s sports bra looks like because they work out together. But it also leads to Ryan putting thongs between his teeth. Jimmy is, in fact, right: It’s sus if you recognize your mom’s underwear.
3.
SoYoung’s Revelation (Episode Two)
One of the early challenges comes in the form of Wall of Secrets: a game designed for chaos in which the goal is to “stump your mom or son with a secret that they don’t know.†The test subjects deliver, using the game to air out their personal skeletons in the closet. Some range from relatively mild MILF deets to more raunchy kiss-and-tells (“I had a seven-woman orgyâ€), but there’s one revelation on the wall that has much more gravitas than the others. Written on a piece of ripped-out notebook paper with a heart-dotted i, it reads: “I slept with my son’s best friend.†Just the presentation of the note harbors a deeply sinister energy in its juvenility, and later in the evening, the secret is revealed to belong to SoYoung, the mother of foot-obsessed Jimmy. When prompted, she reveals her secret without an inkling of remorse, defensively explaining, “I put it down because I thought you weren’t gonna get it.†Jimmy, on the other hand, experiences what I can only call an emotional short circuit. He is on the verge of tears in the confessionals, dejectedly admitting, “I don’t know what to think about it.†It’s an excruciating bit of television for all the wrong reasons.
2.
Disco Mammi’s Racist Tirade (Episode Two)
People will talk a lot about the reality-television “villains†of the year. But if I had to submit a contender for the most unexpected of all, it’d be Kelle, a mother of six from Orange County. Her alter ego “Disco Mammi†schemes ways to steal her objects of affection away from their moms, publicly propositions them for sex, and, in later episodes, exudes a weird coercion vibe on an unsuspecting Billy. However, the back half of episode two is equally vile in a different way.
At this point in the show, Kelle’s object of affection is 28-year-old Jose, whose first language is Spanish, along with his mother, Pola. After Kelle and Jose return from a date, Pola and her son are chatting, naturally, in Spanish. This enrages Kelle, who begins to yell, “No speaking in Spanish, the majority doesn’t know what you’re saying!†and, in a mocking accent, “No mas! No mas!†Later, she corners Pola and Stefany, who is Peruvian, telling them that their Spanish-speaking is “rude†and “disrespectful.†When Pola says it’s her first language, Kelle replies, “You’re not here to speak your first language.†Mind you — as Stefany says later in her confessional — the villa is in Mexico.
1.
Sex Ed (Episode Five)
If the sordid details of MILF Manor had left you relatively unfazed up to this point, you gotta watch this clip. For context: About halfway through the show, mom-and-son duo April W. and Ricky are kicked out of the house for not playing along with the bit. Fear not, though: F-list celebrity Lisa Wilcox (star of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and 5) and her ratboy son, Ryan S., are thrown into the mix, and soon after, the entire group is ushered into a room adorned with a medical diagram of a vagina, bulge-having mannequins, and various accoutrements. The goal? For the experienced older women to show the young men “how it’s done.†You can guess where that leads.
The next ten minutes play out like a snuff film; a failed social experiment never meant for the eyes of the public. (Though isn’t that what the entirety of MILF Manor is at the end of the day?) It should be illegal to film and broadcast mothers asking their sons to point to various parts of the vagina and answer questions about “finishing on the face of a woman,†and yet here we are. The climax (sorry) of the whole experience is brand-new son Ryan S. getting down and dirty with a fruit in excruciating detail in full view of his mother. Terrible, depraved stuff. I need six more seasons.