‘Tough Love’ needed to turn losers into winners

“TOUGH Love New Orleans”

There’s a new reality show on Velvet, “Tough Love New Orleans,” telecast Wednesday afternoon, that bids fair to create a lot of buzz—and/or stink—in the coming weeks. The program helps its eight sexy participants get their respective acts together and tweak how they think of and project themselves, so they can achieve their avowed goal of finding true and lasting love!

Key to their success or failure is the guidance and influence exerted on them by a master matchmaker who doesn’t mince his words when he critiques their appearance and behavior from week to week.

To assure the effectivity of their total makeovers, the show’s resident matchmaker-life coach-drill sergeant-dictator pushes as hard as he can to make his messed-up wards “break,” so that their real personas can finally shine through!

The process is nothing short of arduous and life-changing for everyone involved, and the matchmaker doesn’t have an easy-breezy time of it, either!

‘Heart surgery’

After all, the “ladies” he mentors have acquired many bad habits from years of wrong living and relating to people, so he has to do a lot of damage control— and psychological “heart surgery!”

To date, some of the tilt’s more problematic participants have had major breakdowns, especially the women who have tried to get by with constant lying and running away from the often not-so-telegenic truth.

The program allows the women to do their worst, but makes sure that, at the end of each week, they are held to account for all their lapses and excesses, hoping that they will learn from them and do increasingly better in forthcoming telecasts.

The matchmaker is able to cut through the participants’ web of lies by using the video camera in creative ways.

For instance, each of the women was recently put in cabs, the drivers of which cleverly got them to answer a lot of telling questions. What the participants didn’t know was that the drivers were hired by the show precisely to get the women to tell it like it was!

Then, the recorded “interviews” were replayed for the contestants’ benefit, and they cringed when they saw how crassly they had behaved when they thought that there were no cameras around!

In addition, the women were also made to interact with a number of hunky bachelors, and their conversations were again recorded and played back—for their hopefully instructive benefit!

Messed up

We see from the tilt’s casting that some of the women were chosen precisely because they were so messed up and seemingly headed on a collision course with bone-crunching failure.

The idea is that these obvious losers could make a really huge impact on viewers if the matchmaker is able to snatch them from the very jaws of emotional disaster, through sheer dint of his expertise—and “tough love,” hence the program’s title!

We sure hope that this upbeat scenario does materialize for at least some of them, because similarly down-and-out viewers could learn a lot about how to refocus and rehabilitate their own lives from the participants’ painfully instructive example!

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