Fake Harry is Taking This Show Way Too Seriously

Ever since Fox announced their newest reality show I Wanna Marry Harry , the premise has been met with a mixture of scorn and disbelief. A group of women compete for the chance to marry Prince Harry... except it's not Prince Harry. It's an impostor named Matthew Hicks who, according to the show, bears a 99 percent resemblance to the most eligible royal bachelor. The only compelling part of the show was how, exactly, 12 women actually convinced themselves that Prince Harry would need a reality show to find his next girlfriend, nevermind the fact that Harry was dating Cressida Bonas at the time the show was being filmed. I Wanna Marry Harry finally premiered Tuesday night and proved that we were directing all of our disbelief in the wrong direction.

Prince Harry impostor Matthew Hicks has done a few interviews leading up to the show, interviews that did a lot to prove that he's an unusually kind, down-to-earth guy. Of course, he'd kind of have to be. I mean, tricking 12 women into believing you're a member of the royal family for the most mean-spirited reality television show ever is bad enough without being a jerk on top of that. However, it's one thing to be kind and down-to-earth (and even a bit of a feminist) and another thing to claim to be on the show to find your true love.

That's right. Matthew Hicks himself claims in his confessionals that he hopes to find true love here as well. Somehow, we're supposed to believe that he believes that after spending a season lying and misrepresenting himself, the girl he chooses and reveals his true identity to will say, "Oh, wow, that is hilarious! Tell me all about it over dinner and a movie!"

I'm not sure if Hicks is just that naive or if this was Fox's way of making the show more evenly balanced. Yes, we've been making fun of the girls all this time for being taken in by what is such an obvious hoax, but we should have been making fun of Hicks as well for thinking he can honestly start a relationship based on lies and expect it to all work out in the end. That belief alone could make him well-suited for whichever one of the 12 girls he ultimately ends up choosing in the end. After all, some of them just plain didn't care who he was as long as they could beat the other eleven girls out for his heart.

The latter group is probably going to be pretty disappointed by the fact that the castle, the security detail, and the private helicopter don't really belong to him, but, hey, as the show said, "[Hicks] has a good heart." Surely that's enough to make up for the fact that he's a giant liar? If there's one good thing to say about I Wanna Marry Harry, it's that there's plenty of potential for ridiculousness and derision on both sides of the equation. It's worth checking out at least to watch this situation blow up in Hicks' face in the finale. And to see if he does manage to shock us by somehow convincing the final girl to give him a real first date.

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