Love Correction

The curtain has fallen on the third season of VH1's Couples Therapy, and I am a little concerned about how I'm going to go on without the weekly adrenaline jolt I've been getting from judging everything Joe Francis says, does, wears, and eats, and don't say follow him on Twitter because all he does is retweet compliments misguided idiots give him. Thank God The Pitch came back when it did: judging those goons is like Couples Therapy methadone. Anyway, let's sum up the season the best way I know how: by ranking the couples from first to worst.

Catelynn & Tyler

Everyone's favourite couple from the Teen Mom franchise -- of the first two iterations of the show, the only teen parents to place their child for adoption and the only ones who are still together -- came into this with a lot of potential deficits: they were the youngest; the audience may have known the most about their messed-up childhoods (and, for real, there's a lot to unravel there, starting with Catelynn's substance-addicted mother used to be with Tyler's jailbird father); and though they weren't the only reality-show alumni among the therapy patients, they were the only ones who had cameras in their faces during what were still formative years. Despite all that, Tyler and Catelynn impressed me with their cheerful willingness to let the process help them, and their maturity compared to the older -- sometimes much older (Flav) -- patients in the group, and yes, I'm thinking of the time Joe called all the dudes in to watch Dustin's old porn clips online and Tyler alone emphatically declared that he didn't want to see and would prefer to get an impression of Dustin on his own. I do think they were a bit too easily led into the decision to call off their wedding -- yes, they're young, but some people do get married young and it works out okay (hi!), and they've already been through so much shit that it's statistically possible no more shit will even come their way -- but it seems like they're still together and it probably won't hurt them to wait while they each work out their issues, so since they seem fine with it, I guess I am too.

Dustin & Heather

Yes, I know that, after the show, they broke up in real life. And maybe they'd be ranked lower than this if they'd been in the house longer. (Joe claims they were only there for the last three days, but he claims a lot of things, which I'll get into shortly, so: grain of salt.) They also came into the house with a lot of notoriety, given Dustin's porn past, which Joe, at least, was determined not to let anyone forget about. And while it would have been nice for the show to have been a little more accepting of the whole range of sexual orientation -- that is, given more play to the notion that it's okay to be bisexual -- I give a huge amount of credit to Heather for responding to Joe's hateful declaration that there must be something wrong with her because she's "dating a gay guy!" by replying that if Dustin wants to be with guys, he can be with guys. I'm not going to speculate about whether that is what Dustin wants (though given his recent arrest for sexual battery, it does seem like his ideas about acceptable sexual behaviour in general could use some adjustment). Whatever: they broke up, so the question is moot, but from what we saw of them on the show, they seemed to like each other okay, which is more than I can say for the bottom three couples.

Temple & Chingy

Then there's these two, who didn't even wait until after the show had finished filming to break up, which is probably for the best given that they didn't even feel like going out for dinner together anymore. Let's be real: Temple is beautiful and sweet, and Chingy is a hip-hop star (or was, at least, at some point), so they're both going to be fine in the long run. I kind of wish we'd gotten to see more of Temple's non-group therapy sessions given what we saw the first time Dr. Jenn spoke to her -- viz "My sister was murdered [smile]" -- because her resolutely cheery veneer is obviously hiding some real anger. And I appreciated how direct she was in general, but especially with Joe. I did get the sense that if he ever tried throwing water on her, as he did on Heather last week, she would end him; I also got the sense that he knew that, and that it's why he pulled back in this conversation.

Chingy: whatever. He has his iPad and his experimental sex fasts. Does he even need a girlfriend? Maybe not.

Flav & Liz

Much as I have enjoyed watching Joe engulf the whole show in his poisonous ooze -- and you know I have -- I do regret that Joe's despicability, over the course of the season, crowded out the second-most toxic couple, Flav and Liz. Sure, Joe and Abbey left early (barely, it seems), but Liz started trashing Flav from the first day, threatened to leave a bunch of times, had a breakdown over the confirmation of her pregnancy, and repeatedly called Flav stupid to his face; Flav cheated on Liz, on TV, through several seasons of Flavor Of Love and, all these years later, still won't give her access to his money even though they have a child together in addition to the one that hasn't been born yet. After Joe shat all over the announcement of Liz's pregnancy, Liz and Flav seem to have decided to be on their best behaviour so that he became the house asshole, and why not, he's good at it. But even after seeing them mooning at each other at the nice Italian restaurant in their finest hoodies (Liz arriving with her headphones hooked over her arm was also an elegant touch), I'm pretty sure that, deep down, these two still hate each other.

Joe & Abbey

When I was first introduced to Abbey on the show, my impression was that the docility that Joe is obviously very attracted to as an insecure man was the cause of all her problems: it's kept her under the thumb of an extremely controlling man; it's made her unwilling or unable to defy him; but it's probably also been part of the reason that she has, I imagine, a pretty comfortable life of leisure during all the time she spends not making Joe mad at her. When the production could get her away from Joe, Abbey would show glimmers that, underneath her fembot façade, there might be a person inside. But as of this writing, she's still with Joe, so I guess I was wrong.

I probably don't need to revisit all the shitty things Joe has done over the course of the season -- that's been the topic of pretty much every post I've done on the show, and with good cause -- but I assume we're on the same page that he's worthless and that the world would be a better place if he somehow found himself in a catapult and got shot into outer space. I will say that though I think Berman is mostly fine as far as TV shrinks go, I wish that she had spent some time in Joe and Abbey's last session talking about Joe's homophobic vendetta against Dustin (we're really supposed to believe that Dustin "touched [Joe] inappropriately" in the van and Joe kept it to himself longer than four seconds? Please), but I guess it was more important to tell Abbey and Joe how much progress they'd made because of the time Abbey went to a vegan restaurant and ate some stuff and then when she reported back to Joe on all the food she'd consumed he was like, "Where is it? Did you throw it all up?" Because as a couple, they're great now.

Over the past couple of weeks, Joe has used his Twitter feed to enumerate all the elements of Couples Therapy that were fake, in his view. And yet I bet if VH1 came back to him and offered him a celebreality show about him and Abbey, he would do it, and I would most definitely watch it.