At No. 30 on the list of “TV's 50 Biggest Bombs and Blunders” in the Jan. 29 issue of Entertainment Weekly is “Casting Ryan Jenkins on Megan Wants a Millionaire (VH1, 2009)”:
The hiring of the 32-year-old contestant–who hanged himself soon after police named him as the prime suspect in his wife's murder–highlighted reality TV's reliance on quickie background checks.
]
Jenkins was suspected of
strangling his swimsuit model wife Jasmine Fiore, stuffing her nude and mutilated body
into a small suitcase and tossing the luggage into a Buena Park
apartment complex dumpster in August of last year.
Originally from Canada, Jenkins was immediately named as a suspect, and after an international manhunt he was found hanging from a belt looped over the closet bar in a
British Columbia motel room on Aug. 23.
He had been taped for broadcast as a contestant on Megan Wants a Millionaire, but VH1 canceled the reality show amid the crime investigation. Jenkins was also set to appear on a second VH1 program called I Love Money.
Among EW's bigger bombs and blunders are: No. 9 “Felicity Cuts Her Hair” (The WB, 1999); No. 14 “The Brady Bunch's Cousin Oliver” (ABC, 1974); and, No. 20 “Coy and Vance Replace Bo and Luke Duke [of The Dukes of Hazzard] (CBS, 1982).
Taking the top spot: “Putting Jay Leno at 10 p.m. (NBC).
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.