Hollywood Exes: Let's do this thing!

So after my very exciting "Hey, look at me again please!" post from yesterday, it's already recap time! I took notes and everything, super profesh-like, just to show my commitment. You are welcome.

Drea and Brian, pre-tears.

So let's just begin with Drea, because real life has intruded upon her storyline, unfortunately for her. In real life, Drea is divorcing her husband of 2 months, Brian, who has just been introduced on this show. He was cheating or sending sexts or something gross like that. But in show world, they are still planning their wedding and it makes me feel squirmy just watching it. So anyway, Brian is a singer (and a terrible one at that. My notes about his song are just "no no no no") and is recording a song to sing to Drea at their wedding. My favorite part about this is that Drea seems to think that Brian is very brave to try to sing to her, R. Kelly's ex-wife. She keeps bragging about how R. Kelly is the "The King of R&B" (no arguments here) which seems like something that would piss Brian off. Good thing they're already getting divorced, I guess. Another great moment of this recording studio section of the show is when Drea says that Brian's song makes her feel like she's "pregnant in her ear." It is mostly great because everyone laughs until Brian looks at her, puts his hand up and says "Filter." WOMP WOMP- everything is uncomfortable now. I missed this line upon first watching, but Josh rewound it and told me "Something REALLY bad just happened." which is hilarious. I guess he knows how I might react if he did that to me! Drea handled it well though, so good on you, boo-boo.

Then Shanna and Miss Nevada or something go into Jessica's medical spa, which is scary to me. Just the concept of Jessica doing anything "medical" is frightening. I guess this scene was just to let us know that Miss Nevada's brows NEED WORK.

Nicole and Mayte meet to discuss what I have just decided to call "Sugarbowlgate." Quick recap of that: Nicole had a brunch, and at said her brunch her 18 year old daughter had a purse with fur on it and some baseball player's wife (probably trying to get on this show) was wearing fur. This enraged Mayte and caused her to run away from the brunch, and whilst she fled, Nicole's large glass bowl of raw sugar was smashed on the kitchen floor. Mayte at first claimed this was an accident that happened while she was grabbing her purse, but she already had her purse in her hand soo... Anyway, at this sit down, Nicole reasonably asks for an apology and points out that even if it WAS an accident, the normal person thing to do would have been to be like "Oh dear, I broke something, I am so sorry, let me help you clean it up." Mayte responds to this by saying "Well, we both have our stories...", which, what?! Not really. She refuses to apologize, calls it a "beautiful accident" (PSYCHO), and then asks if they can just move on. She does offer to replace the sugar bowl, but that is the only decent thing she says to Nicole. Nicole realizes that she is way too awesome for this, so pretty much whatever, but now she knows Mayte is batshit insane.

Crazy Mayte. 

We then get a super awkward scene between Cray Cray Mayte and her boyfriend Humberto, who decide during dinner they want to have a baby, and then go to their bedroom to make one, but not before inviting her one million dogs into the room with them. NO NO NO.

Drea returns in a super sad sequence where she tries on wedding dresses and her assistant casts doubt on her impending nuptials. It just kind of bummed me out,  except for the part where Drea kept calling her assistant Tony,  "my boo-boo kitty." That part was awesome.

THEN (yes, there is more!) Shanna has a poker party for charity or something? I am not clear on why. These things happen at the party:

• Jessica meets a guy that she thinks is hot. Nicole does not like his vest. "That vest is killing me right now. Somebody get him a shirt." Nicole is the best.
• Sheree gets drunk and it makes me like her more.
• Drea's assistant Tony has a talk with her fiance Brian in which he says that R. Kelly "runs Chicago." It made me think maybe R. Kelly is gonna have this guy killed or something now.
• Sheree confronts Mayte about how she missed her husband's 40th bday party (where she was supposed to be making mojitos!). Sheree has been ON about this every damn episode. They make up, basically because Mayte brings up a baby she lost many years ago and there is a not a good way to argue with that. Sheree acknowledges in her talking head that Mayte was just using the dead baby thing to get out of the argument, so basically I am liking Sheree more every minute in this ep!

At some point Jessica goes and visits her 17 year old daughter on a modeling shoot, where she makes sad noises about her daughter moving away sometime soon. During this scene I wrote "Remember that show Empty Nest?!" to myself. Yes, I do, self. I do indeed. 

The last scene of the show is another cringe-making Drea and Brian scene, where Drea tries to convince him to reverse his vasectomy so she can have his baby. I have to say, I gotta side with Brian in this scene, because she knew this guy didn't want to have kids 3 months ago when she met him and last week or whenever she agreed to marry him. So she just seems kind of delusional here. 

Next week:

Jessica and Shanna get into it over something, finally bringing Shanna into the action! Also more Drea and Brian. Yeesh. 

Get excited people who used read this blog 4 years ago! I'm back!

I was recently wondering why I could not find any good recaps of the horrible, super trashy, and insane reality shows that Josh and I watch on a weekly basis. They are so ripe for hilarious (yet kind, these ARE real people) commentary! So I decided that if no one was going to do it for me, I would have to do it myself! (This is the "bootstraps" mentality so favored in this country, so naturally, I expect a lot of props).

While I have read many hilarious "Real Housewives" recaps, I can never find any good recaps of the reality shows on VHI, including "Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta" and "Hollywood Exes." Where are my kindred spirits who cannot help but love Lil Scrappy?! Or others who are willing to acknowledge that Matye Garcia is disturbingly insane, and almost never makes any sense at all?! (Prince really dodged a bullet there.) So here I am to give you a quick primer on these two shows.

First, let's start with Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta, because wow. There is a lot going here. Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta is one of the most obviously scripted reality shows I have seen, and yet it is also seems weirdly invested in having characters expose all of the artifice. The minute you might say to yourself  "Are Stevie and Joseline even actually married?" like 20 other cast members are asking the same thing.

This season we have:

Steve J (a producer) and Joseline ( a performer of some sort), who are terrible, being fake married and fake rich, after years of torturing his ex and mother of his child Mimi, who I always liked but now is pretending that a porn she made with her greasy boyfriend is actually a stolen sex tape, which somehow makes me like her less. (This show is not appropriate for children, in case you didn't get that). So they are always trying to take each other down, yet Mimi and Stevie have some kind of undeniable connection that makes them sort of still into each other as they try to expose each other's dirty secrets etc. So basically, super great soap opera plot here, though these days no one is exactly rootable.

Lil Scrappy, you gotta love him.

Then there is Lil Scrappy, a rapper who is a sweet man-child with a PSYCHOTIC mother named Momma Dee. She is scary and always hates his girlfriends and says things like "She is B.I.C.T.H- in that order!" (I am not sure what she thinks that spells.) Scrappy stories are pretty much always the same. He has a girlfriend, or a fiancee, but then he also has this SUPER HOT, nice, "friend" who relentlessly wants to sleep with him, usually, weirdly, at the behest of his mother. Even though he is always cheating on his girlfriend, I cannot help but love him, because he seems so sweet and just desperate for all the love he can get, and when you look at the woman who raised him, you are kind of like "I get that." It's kind of like how everyone hates Don Draper for being a cheating drunk, but when you really consider his upbringing you think to yourself "It's a miracle this guy isn't a serial killer!" (Maybe I

Kirk and Rasheeda, he is the WORST.

will recap the season finale of Mad Men for you high-minded people.) Same goes, to a lesser degree, for Lil Scrappy. Also he has this charming marble-mouthed way of speaking and is pretty funny. He's my favorite person on this show, by far.

Kirk and Rasheeda are a married couple who are having problems. She is a rapper and he is sort of her manager, but it seems like he just says mean stuff to like it's his job. So, their problems are basically that Rasheeda is cool and smart and Kirk is the absolute WORST. He seemed okay until last season when he cheated on his pregnant wife, and then had the gall to deny his child demand a paternity test from her. (Um, YOU are the one who cheated dude.) This season he has already told his child's grandmother not to kiss the baby and attempted to hire a hot nanny so he could just have a side-chick right in his damn house. He is weirdly mean to Rasheeda all the time, and even Stevie J, former holder of the title "the absolute WORST" thinks he is being shady and should just be nice to his wife.

We also have Karlie Redd, who is a singer, I think, and is right now dating rapper Yung Joc. Well at least she was until she found that he was sleeping with their real estate agent, who revealed this to Karlie when she was showing them a house they might rent. So that seemed super real and not a set up. Another note on Karlie, she pretends to 29 when she is pretty clearly a decade older. Just own it, girl!

Massachusetts' own Benzino, former owner of The Source magazine, is also sort of on this show, and he got shot in real life during the filming, so I expect his role in the latter half of the season will increase. He is friends with Stevie J, which means he is probably a terrible person deep down, but manages to come off okay most of the time, as long as he doesn't get his own storyline.

Oh and Waka Flocka Flame and his fiancee whose name I cannot remember are also on this. He seems nice and they are planning a wedding so I am sure this will all blow up at some point soon, because this show is definitely not about having happy people on it.

There are some other ladies on the show who are ostensibly, if you look at the titles, main characters, but so far this season they mostly seem to exist to comment on the personal lives of the aforementioned.

So that's Love and Hip Hop: Atlanta. Are you even ready for Hollywood Exes? I don't know if I am, but here goes.

Hollywood Exes, oh boy. 

Hollywood Exes is a show that is an a more traditional reality show style, as in, the network makes these people have all these weird parties and events that puts them together and then they fight and at some point in the season, they all go on a trip together and fight some more. Lovers of Real Housewives are encouraged to check this out. On this show we have:

Nicole Murphy, Eddie Murphy's ex wife. She is beautiful and amazing, why Eddie Murphy would have left this woman is beyond me. She is now engaged to Michael Strahan, from Live with Michael and Kelly, who seems great, so good for her.

Jessica Canseco, Jose Canseco's ex, who is the kind of person who has no filter and therefore says really inappropriate things all the time, but people still kind of like her. Perfect for a reality show, bravo VH1!

Andrea Kelly, R. KELLY's  ex wife,  and who is EXACTLY as insane and weird yet great as you might expect R. Kelly's ex to be. She comes up with a lot of catchphrases, such as "Check yo' email" and "Hollywood fa boo-boo." She is very emotional and gets so fired up all the time, about basically everything. VH1 really did a bang up job casting this show.

Mayte Garcia, Prince's ex. A fanatical animal rights activist, she has no problem destroying people's things if they even let someone wear fur in her presence. She also has no self awareness whatsoever. She is someone who has pretty clearly benefited from being insanely beautiful for her entire life, so has never had to actually be normal or treat people respectfully. She thinks that if she smashes her friends things "accidentally" in a blind rage over a fur purse, that SHE is the one who deserves an apology. Ugh Mayte. ugh.

Sheree Fletcher, Will Smith's ex. Like LONG AGO ex. Who was married to him for two years. And unlike Mayte, who is in a similar situation, she doesn't even really seem to give a crap about Will Smith or think about him ever, which is good. However, we're stretching the premise here. She's a preacher's wife and is always moralizing so I really dislike her.

These are the most interesting Hollywood Exes. Martin Lawrence's ex, Shamicka, and Shanna Moakler, ex of Travis Barker AND Oscar De La Hoya (double Hollywood Ex!!) are on it as well. They're kind of new, I'm not attached to them yet. Shamicka seems nice and boring, Shanna seems nice and kind of funny. But everyone on reality show seems nice until you get them into mansion in Aspen or some shit, and then everything goes BONKERS.

While the cast of Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta has to contend with marriages being destroyed, sex tapes, miscarriages, and even being shot, the ladies of Hollywood Exes basically just fight about sugar containers being smashed on the floor, mojitos not being made, birthday parties being skipped, and fur hats being set on fire as a prank. The stakes are lower, which means this show rarely if ever veers into that "Oh god, this is depressing, I am a bad person for watching this" kind of territory. They are rich ladies with rich lady problems, for the most part. How nice for them.

So your assignment? Watch these shows! Then I can recap them for you and together we will laugh and laugh. It'll be great, trust me!