![]() ![]() For now, Kelle is a chipper vertex of the Mommy and Me love triangle that is packaged as the episode’s cliffhanger. Pola’s passion only becomes visible when they are back on the land, and she spots her son Jose close-talking to Kelle, a peroxide blond who has an alter-ego called “Disco Mommy” (hopefully there will be more on this later?). “I used to do this with Jose when he was younger,” she enthuses as she is seen holding her date aloft on her shins in an airplane pose. They lie across their paddleboards and do stomach crunches as well as partner yoga, an activity that Pola says reminds her of raising her son. Pola goes on a paddleboarding “mini date” with a young foot fetishist named Jimmy. Love is in the air, but it’s of the Freudian variety. “I am doing this for Ashley in a lot of ways,” she says of her visit to Milf Manor. It’s a ghastly revelation, but Charlene is quick to put a sunny spin on it. ![]() “I decided I was going to live happily,” Pola says, “and just move forward!” Charlene, who comes from New Jersey and now lives in Hollywood, is mourning her daughter, who died less than a year ago, at age 27. We learn that Pola, a fast-talking former ballerina who has relocated from Mexico to Miami, lost her husband in a car accident when their children were very young. Photographs of the female participants in earlier times are accompanied by micro-explainers. In a repudiation of the trend for defining characters by their past traumas, the women gathered here all have in common a perky disposition and distaste for investigating their pasts. It might also explain the spirit of denial that pervades the show. ![]() The mother-son infatuation that dominates Milf Manor is a bit hard to swallow, and doesn’t bear close examination. Small surprise, then, that when sparks fly in Milf Manor, they’re between the women and their offspring. Meanwhile, one of the young men who appears on Hulu’s older woman-younger man reality dating show Back in the Groove (hosted by How Stella Got Her Groove Back star Taye Diggs) revealed that his mother is one of the middle-aged love-seekers. Filial devotion to one’s mother is all the rage, from Prince Harry’s memoir of the moment to the flex du jour of self-identifying as a “mama’s boy”. According to 2022 census data, 19% of men ages 25-34 still live with their parents. It’s the unsettling truth that lies at the show’s (ridiculously well-toned) core: Milf Manor is a celebration of an entrenched American tradition: the failure to launch. The most uncomfortable aspect of Milf Manor is not the silly title nor the eerily smooth foreheads that abound. But more of us might see through the hashtag feminism and identify Milf Manor as a gussied-up American tragedy. The May-December romance story has been rewritten! Older women get their shot at dewy-fleshed paramours. Finally, some might say, the tables are turned. And the sons, in turn, are forced to watch their mothers bat their eyes at men who might not be old enough to rent a car. In this production, mothers must watch their precious sons chat up older women. It’s a Mommy and Me pajama party that comes with uniquely low stakes, but the queasy factor is through the roof. They can lounge around all day in their fleece pjs, and give mom a hug when the spirit moves them. Welcome to the bachelor pad where men aren’t ever expected to leave the nest. The winners get to sleep in the villa’s biggest bedrooms – but what does square footage matter when everyone gets to shack up with her son at the end of the day? You won’t find nerve-racking contests either, unless you count the pin the tail on the donkey-ish game in which blindfolded mothers must run their hands over eight young men’s torsos and identify their offspring. How can a show engineered to touch a nerve be so boring? Thus far, at least, Milf Manor presents no outsize personalities, which means this is reality programming devoid of the clashes and catfights one might expect from reality programming. This time, though, the milf content is for real. The notion of a reality dating show based on moms and their boys has been in the ether since 2008, when a 30 Rock episode parodied how-low-can-you-go reality programming with Milf Island. The program’s oedipal twist emerges in the beginning of the first episode, a front-loaded affair that struggles to know what to do with itself once the vaguely incestuous and thoroughly cringey reveal is out of the way. There’s no denying that the overlying concept is rather horrifying: eight mothers descend on a Mexican villa, all single and ready to mingle with an octet of twentysomething men – who happen to be their sons. ![]()
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