Mr Kinky Just Laugh

Mr Kinky Just Laugh
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A history of 2003’s ‘Mr. Personality.’
Screenshot via YouTube - Contestants in the TV show 'Mr. Personality'.
Revisiting the Monica Lewinsky-hosted dating show that was too weird to work
Mr. Personality , which aired on Fox for a scant five weeks in 2003, was a show about a single woman choosing between 20 men to find the love of her life. That was the standard part, accompanied by two stranger details: All the men had to wear masks (okay, kinky, but not so weird), and it was hosted by a post-Clinton scandal Monica Lewinsky (excuse me, what?).
Produced during the height of what some described as reality televsion’s “golden era,” Mr. Personality ’s premise was simple, if gimmicky: What if instead of judging romantic partners on their looks, they were judged solely on their personalities? Putting that into motion for a TV audience turned out to be a somewhat convoluted process. Like on The Bachelor, which premiered in 2002, Mr. Personality challenged one woman, obviously a beautiful one, to find the love of her life out of a selection of 20 “average-looking,” mask-wearing men. The men had to wear their masks at all times, except for when they went with the woman to a special, dark room, where the man would remove his mask and the woman, hilariously, was allowed to feel his face. The men were also forbidden from revealing their professions .
Producers hoped that the presence of Lewinsky, who had found a living in selling handbags online, would set the show apart. If anything, it only exposed Lewinsky, who was 29 at the time, to even more public shaming. At the time, she was trying to rehabilitate her image . The year before, she had appeared on an HBO special in which she fielded questions about her life, town-hall style. “There, sitting casually on the edge of the stage in a black pantsuit, Ms. Lewinsky tries to project the image of a well-adjusted, forward-looking person, who was treated badly by Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp and the media,” The New York Times wrote in a review of the show. “She actually projects the image of an emotionally distraught person trapped by her past, who was treated badly by Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp and the media.”
A promo for *Mr. Personality*. LostRealityTV / YouTube
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the reaction to Lewinsky’s role on Mr. Personality was roundly dismissive. “If you were trying to put the past behind you and restore your good name, would you become a reality TV host?” wrote Joanne Ostrow in The Denver Post . “Ah, but you are not Monica Lewinsky. And for that you must count your blessings.” “Monica Lewinsky at last has a television series and a network worthy of her immeasurable talents,” Ed Bark mused in The Wichita Eagle . “It's Fox's Mr. Personality , which surely must be the bottom of the bin in the lately faltering "reality" show genre. If not, America might as well elect Anna Nicole Smith president and switch its collective intellect to a permanent ‘Off.’ Really, what's the point in going on?” “When she's asked, ‘What's the most humiliating thing you've ever done?’ she has a new answer,” joked Tina Fey at the 2003 Matrix Awards .
In an effort to understand the time, and this bizarre show, better, I talked to some of the people involved with making it happen. In this brief oral history, The Outline spoke with casting directors Sheila Conlin and Katy Wallin, producer Scott Firestone, mask designer Tina Haatainen-Jones, and former contestant Brian Karalus. (Through a spokesperson, Monica Lewinsky declined to comment for this piece. Mr. Personality bachelorette Hayley Arp and winner William Dyck did not respond to request for comment.) Here’s what some of those who know Mr. Personality best told me.
Production called upon Haatainen-Jones to make the masks for the show. A costume arts professor and freelance costume designer who had previously worked on live performances, Mr. Personality was Haatainen-Jones’s first and last foray into reality television.
A commercial for 'Mr. Personality'. LostRealityTV / YouTube
Jim Carrey wears a replica 'Mr. Personality' mask to begin his 2003 appearance on 'The Tonight Show.' Screenshot via YouTube
According to Conlin and Wallin, who both still work in unscripted television casting, some of reality TV’s now-standard vetting processes were first conceived on Mr. Personality . The potential dangers of all that reality had quickly revealed themselves: A year earlier, Big Brother’s Justin Sebik became the first person to get kicked off of a reality show for holding a knife to a fellow contestant’s neck . Mr. Personality contestants were put through extensive medical and psychological evaluations, background checks, and STD tests as part of the vetting process.
The woman tasked with finding the love of her life on Mr. Personality was Hayley Arp, a 26-year-old stockbroker from Atlanta. In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published on the day Mr. Personality premiered, Arp said that she was a fan of reality dating shows like Joe Millionaire and was connected to a casting director when a friend gave them her number. “I was just so intrigued by it,” she said of Mr. Personality’s premise. “Here was an opportunity to find 20 decent men who aren't criminals and don't have mental illnesses and are all good guys.”
One of those guys was Brian Karalus, a criminal defense attorney from St. Paul.
Mr. Personality didn’t have a cash prize. But despite the negative reviews, and the fact that it premiered during National TV-Turnoff Week , the show proved an attractive spectacle, at least briefly. More than 12 million people tuned into its premiere, though by the second episode, viewership had dropped 29 percent, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times . By the season’s end, interest waned enough that Fox cut down the finale from two hours to one, as reported in USA Today . (That the first episode of the three-night Season 2 finale of the wildly popular American Idol aired the same night (and drew 16.9 million viewers, according to the AP) was likely a factor.) Still, more than 11 million people tuned in to watch Arp take the mask off of her new love, a real estate investor named William Dyck, and see his face for the first time. The moment lives on in the work of newspaper critics.
Will Dyck, the silver mask, and Haley Arp at a Beverly Hills store grand opening in June 2003. Vince Bucci / Getty Images
Neither FOX nor Nash Entertainment, which produced the show, has Mr. Personality available online. Both claimed in emails to me that the other has the rights to original footage of the show; the only links to footage I scrounge up are clips of commercials uploaded to YouTube. Old newspaper articles and message boards are the some of the only sources to find out what actually happened on Mr. Personality . They tell us Lewinsky’s screen time was limited , that Arp emerged as a likeable but tepid star, and that one of the finalists worked as a motivational speaker, listened to motivational tapes while he slept, and tried to hypnotize Arp in order to win.
For posterity, however, what matters most about Mr. Personality are the alarmist reactions it inspired. It became a punching bag that signified everything critics considered “wrong” about the genre. As Mark Perigard wrote in The Boston Herald, “But as war rolls over the tube, the so-called reality shows just seem irrelevant….. Fox's upcoming dating show Mr. Personality with a disgraced and disgraceful Monica Lewinsky hosting as a woman chooses among several masked men, sounds like an early April Fools' joke. The courtship could be finally over for reality TV. Time for viewers to say, ‘I don't.’”
After Mr. Personality , reality television would go on to become even more twisted and grotesque (if you’ve forgotten about 2010’s Bridalplasty consider yourself lucky), while also becoming part of the air we breathe. With a reality TV show star as our president, it’s no wonder that outrageous unscripted shows — like Dr. Pimple Popper , Live PD : Women on Patrol , Floribama Shore , The Proposal , Seatbelt Psychic , and the upcoming MTV Jackass -esque series Too Stupid to Die — are once again bubbling up alongside the current spate of nostalgic revivals and reboots. Whatever sign of our culture’s downfall comes next, it’ll be one we’ve probably seen before.

A history of 2003’s ‘Mr. Personality.’
Screenshot via YouTube - Contestants in the TV show 'Mr. Personality'.
Revisiting the Monica Lewinsky-hosted dating show that was too weird to work
Mr. Personality , which aired on Fox for a scant five weeks in 2003, was a show about a single woman choosing between 20 men to find the love of her life. That was the standard part, accompanied by two stranger details: All the men had to wear masks (okay, kinky, but not so weird), and it was hosted by a post-Clinton scandal Monica Lewinsky (excuse me, what?).
Produced during the height of what some described as reality televsion’s “golden era,” Mr. Personality ’s premise was simple, if gimmicky: What if instead of judging romantic partners on their looks, they were judged solely on their personalities? Putting that into motion for a TV audience turned out to be a somewhat convoluted process. Like on The Bachelor, which premiered in 2002, Mr. Personality challenged one woman, obviously a beautiful one, to find the love of her life out of a selection of 20 “average-looking,” mask-wearing men. The men had to wear their masks at all times, except for when they went with the woman to a special, dark room, where the man would remove his mask and the woman, hilariously, was allowed to feel his face. The men were also forbidden from revealing their professions .
Producers hoped that the presence of Lewinsky, who had found a living in selling handbags online, would set the show apart. If anything, it only exposed Lewinsky, who was 29 at the time, to even more public shaming. At the time, she was trying to rehabilitate her image . The year before, she had appeared on an HBO special in which she fielded questions about her life, town-hall style. “There, sitting casually on the edge of the stage in a black pantsuit, Ms. Lewinsky tries to project the image of a well-adjusted, forward-looking person, who was treated badly by Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp and the media,” The New York Times wrote in a review of the show. “She actually projects the image of an emotionally distraught person trapped by her past, who was treated badly by Bill Clinton, Linda Tripp and the media.”
A promo for *Mr. Personality*. LostRealityTV / YouTube
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the reaction to Lewinsky’s role on Mr. Personality was roundly dismissive. “If you were trying to put the past behind you and restore your good name, would you become a reality TV host?” wrote Joanne Ostrow in The Denver Post . “Ah, but you are not Monica Lewinsky. And for that you must count your blessings.” “Monica Lewinsky at last has a television series and a network worthy of her immeasurable talents,” Ed Bark mused in The Wichita Eagle . “It's Fox's Mr. Personality , which surely must be the bottom of the bin in the lately faltering "reality" show genre. If not, America might as well elect Anna Nicole Smith president and switch its collective intellect to a permanent ‘Off.’ Really, what's the point in going on?” “When she's asked, ‘What's the most humiliating thing you've ever done?’ she has a new answer,” joked Tina Fey at the 2003 Matrix Awards .
In an effort to understand the time, and this bizarre show, better, I talked to some of the people involved with making it happen. In this brief oral history, The Outline spoke with casting directors Sheila Conlin and Katy Wallin, producer Scott Firestone, mask designer Tina Haatainen-Jones, and former contestant Brian Karalus. (Through a spokesperson, Monica Lewinsky declined to comment for this piece. Mr. Personality bachelorette Hayley Arp and winner William Dyck did not respond to request for comment.) Here’s what some of those who know Mr. Personality best told me.
Production called upon Haatainen-Jones to make the masks for the show. A costume arts professor and freelance costume designer who had previously worked on live performances, Mr. Personality was Haatainen-Jones’s first and last foray into reality television.
A commercial for 'Mr. Personality'. LostRealityTV / YouTube
Jim Carrey wears a replica 'Mr. Personality' mask to begin his 2003 appearance on 'The Tonight Show.' Screenshot via YouTube
According to Conlin and Wallin, who both still work in unscripted television casting, some of reality TV’s now-standard vetting processes were first conceived on Mr. Personality . The potential dangers of all that reality had quickly revealed themselves: A year earlier, Big Brother’s Justin Sebik became the first person to get kicked off of a reality show for holding a knife to a fellow contestant’s neck . Mr. Personality contestants were put through extensive medical and psychological evaluations, background checks, and STD tests as part of the vetting process.
The woman tasked with finding the love of her life on Mr. Personality was Hayley Arp, a 26-year-old stockbroker from Atlanta. In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published on the day Mr. Personality premiered, Arp said that she was a fan of reality dating shows like Joe Millionaire and was connected to a casting director when a friend gave them her number. “I was just so intrigued by it,” she said of Mr. Personality’s premise. “Here was an opportunity to find 20 decent men who aren't criminals and don't have mental illnesses and are all good guys.”
One of those guys was Brian Karalus, a criminal defense attorney from St. Paul.
Mr. Personality didn’t have a cash prize. But despite the negative reviews, and the fact that it premiered during National TV-Turnoff Week , the show proved an attractive spectacle, at least briefly. More than 12 million people tuned into its premiere, though by the second episode, viewership had dropped 29 percent, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times . By the season’s end, interest waned enough that Fox cut down the finale from two hours to one, as reported in USA Today . (That the first episode of the three-night Season 2 finale of the wildly popular American Idol aired the same night (and drew 16.9 million viewers, according to the AP) was likely a factor.) Still, more than 11 million people tuned in to watch Arp take the mask off of her new love, a real estate investor named William Dyck, and see his face for the first time. The moment lives on in the work of newspaper critics.
Will Dyck, the silver mask, and Haley Arp at a Beverly Hills store grand opening in June 2003. Vince Bucci / Getty Images
Neither FOX nor Nash Entertainment, which produced the show, has Mr. Personality available online. Both claimed in emails to me that the other has the rights to original footage of the show; the only links to footage I scrounge up are clips of commercials uploaded to YouTube. Old newspaper articles and message boards are the some of the only sources to find out what actually happened on Mr. Personality . They tell us Lewinsky’s screen time was limited , that Arp emerged as a likeable but tepid star, and that one of the finalists worked as a motivational speaker, listened to motivational tapes while he slept, and tried to hypnotize Arp in order to win.
For posterity, however, what matters most about Mr. Personality are the alarmist reactions it inspired. It became a punching bag that signified everything critics considered “wrong” about the genre. As Mark Perigard wrote in The Boston Herald, “But as war rolls over the tube, the so-called reality shows just seem irrelevant….. Fox's upcoming dating show Mr. Personality with a disgraced and disgraceful Monica Lewinsky hosting as a woman chooses among several masked men, sounds like an early April Fools' joke. The courtship could be finally over for reality TV. Time for viewers to say, ‘I don't.’”
After Mr. Personality , reality television would go on to become even more twisted and grotesque (if you’ve forgotten about 2010’s Bridalplasty consider yourself lucky), while also becoming part of the air we breathe. With a reality TV show star as our president, it’s no wonder that outrageous unscripted shows — like Dr. Pimple Popper , Live PD : Women on Patrol , Floribama Shore , The Proposal , Seatbelt Psychic , and the upcoming MTV Jackass -esque series Too Stupid to Die — are once again bubbling up alongside the current spate of nostalgic revivals and reboots. Whatever sign of our culture’s downfall comes next, it’ll be one we’ve probably seen before.

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