Burning Love's Julie Accidentally Sums Up The Bachelorette

When I advised you all last week to tune in for the second season of Burning Love on E!, little did I know that said second season would be so much better than the first. Don't get me wrong: I loved the first season, and if you were to choose to go back and watch it, you would probably be thoroughly entertained. But Season 2 has been insanely great.

Full disclosure: though I am not super-into either version of the Bachelor/ette franchise, I much prefer The Bachelorette. Maybe for the same reasons that kept me from getting on board with Hello Ladies, I'm far less interested watching a bunch of women jockeying for a man's attention than the opposite. And maybe that's part of what's made me fall so deeply, passionately in love with Burning Love's second season: as on The Bachelorette, the guys are so unaccustomed to putting effort into winning a woman's attention while surrounded at all times by their rivals that they go hilariously overboard trying to distinguish themselves from one another. Every guy leans heavily on whatever gimmick he's decided is going to be his trademark, from wearing a guitar at all times to being Jewish to having been born premature.

At the center of the series is Julie, whose gimmick during the first season of Burning Love was that she was emotionally unstable in the extreme. And though she held it together okay during her season's first two episodes (other than immediately requiring an underwear change after meeting the super-hot Blaze and being completely unable to tell he isn't into her, like, at all), the third episode's puppet show group date serves her up an opportunity to lose her shit, spectacularly.

One of the things that makes The Bachelorette (particularly the latest season) so entertaining is the way the guys use their limited alone time with the titular lady to undermine each other, and in "Puppet Show," we get to see this trope spoofed as single dad Alex tattles to Julie that former BL therapist Damien pronounced the date's activity "dumb." Julie stews for a while and then confronts Damien about it; when he admits that he may have said something about the date was dumb, she way overreacts, cursing at Damien and ordering him to leave. Once he's gone, she tries to come down from her rage high by making the remaining guys back her up: "What about a bunch of adults making puppets is dumb?!" "...Nothing?" "THANK YOU!"

As I wrote last week, the genius of Burning Love is how it only needs to heighten the reality of The Bachelor/ette about a notch and a half, because the original is so absurd and accidentally laughable to begin with. And Julie's own summation of the incident is a perfect capper because, like so many of Burning Love's best moments, it makes text what is normally just (barely) subtext on any season of either of the original shows.

Genius.