y one television obsession is Joe Millionaire. Somehow the series’ twist – bringing dramatic irony back into our tragedy -- makes it far more tolerable than The Bachelor, which made me want to torch my television. Joe Millionaire is cheeky enough, the girls ruthless enough, the male star goofy enough that I’m riveted. I turn it on promising to watch for a mere 15 minutes only to find myself on the other side of 9pm, breathless and guilty, like I gobbled a pint of ice cream.

In last night’s episode, four finalists are vying for the love of Evan, aka Joe Millionaire, the ruggedly handsome construction worker they falsely believe has 50 million dollars.* Zora is the voice of reason on the show, so I assume she’ll be eliminated eventually. A substitute teacher who loves horses and wears a tank top over her swimsuit, Zora is only one who actually seems wounded by the prospect of sharing a guy with other women.
“Zora’s uptight,” Evan complains. “She’s going to need to trust me,” he says, without a trace of self-awareness.
Sarah and Melissa gossip and backstab and wear bikinis like band-aids; they’re cute but trifling. And then there’s Mojo, the go-get-em-tiger loan officer whose date with Evan provided the episode’s classic cringe moment.
“I have a present for you," she tells Evan.
“Did you make it yourself?” he asks.
She did. It’s a poem and a puzzle. How … sweet. And though the producers spare us her stanzas less we sue, they give us a bitter taste: The poem begins with the word “Butterflies.”
Evan looks pained. So are we.
We hear him in voiceover: “I guess that was real nice that she made it and all, but the part about being husband and wife kind of freaked me out.”
“Now in order to finish the poem,” Mojo says, nuzzling his shoulder, “you have to do the puzzle.”
Next we see Evan at a table, lamely piecing together the puzzle.
Evan’s voiceover: “And it turns out that the puzzle is a picture of her.”
Oh, and what a picture it is! Mojo in full-on Budweiser-floozy mode, hair blowing in the breeze, the picture emblazoned with the words “I CHOOSE YOU!”
(Who couldn’t love this? My jaw swept the floor!)
“Uh, no one had ever given me anything like that before,” Evan tells us, which is the kind of brilliant understatement that makes it impossible to hate him.
Later Mojo shows Evan pictures of her family and, huh, what’s that? Oh, it’s a check for a million dollars that she wrote herself and plans to cash one day.
Mojo is off the show.
She takes the news of her rejection with dignity, as the trio of women selected to stay wear new ruby necklaces and false looks of pity, but Evan does Mojo no favors by telling her the outrageous lie, “The present was so sweet. It was beautiful, and I thank you.” As Mojo packs her things to go, we hear her saying, “I don’t know what I could have done wrong. I don’t know if I said something wrong or what?” Because in Mojo’s world, pictures of Mojo with psycho shit like “I Choose You!” ain’t nothing but a Mojo thang, you know what I’m saying?
In the show’s closing moments, the butler – obviously the show’s best character – complains to the camera, “Another week and I didn’t get a necklace. However, I did leave with one souvenir.” And here he holds the puzzle up to the camera. “I Choose You!” Now that’s good television.

*Recently, a college friend was featured in the Joe Millionaire issue of Us Weekly as a Joe Millionaire lookalike, which couldn’t have made me giddier. Justin Sullivan works as a fact-checker at the magazine, which spiffed him up and sent him into a crowd outside of MTV’s TRL to sign autographs. This gives me an idea for a new reality television series on FOX: Justin Sullivan pretends to be Joe Millionaire for a bunch of buxom foreign women who haven’t seen season one yet but only hear through American friends and magazines about this Joe Millionaire, star of the hottest reality television show today, and so think Justin might help them break into the biz. Will true love prevail?