Does anyone need more proof that reality TV stars will do anything to extend their 15 minutes of fame?
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In February 2000, Darva, who was then a 34-year-old emergency room nurse, was selected by Rick Rockwell to be his bride on Fox's pioneering reality-competition show Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?. Although Fox cancelled rebroadcast of the show and Darva and Rick's marriage was quickly annulled after it turned out that (i) Rick had been accused of beating a former girlfriend and (ii) Darva didn't even like him, Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? drew HUGE ratings that are credited with launching the reality TV boom. (At the time, a tame professor from Syracuse lamented that reality TV would just get "more and more surrealistic" after the upcoming launch that summer of CBS's Survivor and Big Brother. We'll let you draw your own conclusions.)
All the attention paid to the show kept Darva in the spotlight for a little while ... despite claiming that she just wanted to regain her privacy. But then came such antics as nude photographs in Playboy, "Reality TV Celebrity" Dog Eat Dog and an embarrassing defeat in a celebrity boxing match against diminutive former Olympic gymnast Olga Korbut. Last year, Darva was named one of the Top 10 Reality TV celebrities -- one of only three former reality-competition contestants to make the list. She also went back to work as an ER nurse and got married again, to a paramedic who said he'd never seen Multimillionaire (lucky him).
Because of her background, Darva can be expected to be sympathetic to the quickie-Vegas-wedding "victims." However, the semi-documentary style show is less sympathetic. Vegas Weddings Unveiled will "infiltrate" real-life Vegas wedding chapels, wedding limos and marriage "hot spots" to examine the spontaneous atmosphere of weddings in the gaming capital of the world. Creators and executive producers of the six-episode series that debuted June 18 (which will probably run forever in reruns on GSN) are Sam Sokolow and Rob Lobl of SokoLobl Entertainment.
Rich Cronin, CEO of GSN, said, "In light of famous impromptu weddings, we were eager to branch out into this genre and feel like this is a fresh take on a very beloved tradition" We guess that's one way to look at quickie Vegas weddings -- "a very beloved tradition" -- but we doubt Britney Spears' parents would agree.
According to Cronin, the show also "played on the inherent tension of the couples" (or perhaps their high blood-alcohol levels) "by manufacturing some difficult situations to see how they would react." We wonder what situation could be much more difficult that getting married on the spur of the moment ... unless, of course, you decide to get married on the spur of the moment and then make a wedding-night sex tape, as Survivor: All-Stars third-place finisher Jenna Lewis and her male-model husband did in May. On the other hand, it would seem that, if you were going to make a sex tape featuring the number of positions and acts that Jenna's reputedly does, a quickie wedding beforehand might not be such a bad idea, since it would probably prevent the lawsuits over tape ownership that have bedeviled previous reality-TV sex-tape queen Paris Hilton once the tape spreads to the Internet.
We hope we aren't giving the producers any ideas for future "difficult situations."
Said Darva, "I am very excited about this project and opportunity to serve as host of my own show. I feel that it is a great way to make a negative experience into something positive and fruitful." Or at least a better way than getting your butt kicked by Olga Korbut.
