Review: ‘The Millionaire Matchmaker’ on Bravo

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By accident or design, Bravo has become a network concerned with the rich and the people who serve them. ‘Flipping Out,’ ‘Work Out,’ ‘Blow Out,’ ‘Million Dollar Listing,’ ‘Welcome to the Parker,’ ‘The Rachel Zoe Project’ -- show after show highlights various facets of what might be called the luxury service industries, in which people become rich, or try to, catering to the very rich, while the popular ‘Real Housewives’ franchise just looks at the moneyed straight on.

Given that we are in the middle of a financial meltdown/free-fall/apocalypse, one might think that the problems of people with too much money would have lost their entertainment value. But one would apparently be wrong.

And there is “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” beginning its second season tonight. Following the adventures of a real-world modern Dolly Levi -- Patti Stanger of the Millionaire’s Club -- it is in some ways the most disturbing of these shows, in that it traffics in humans, and in other ways the most obvious: The lonely millionaire -- the man who has everything except that one thing that would make all the other things worthwhile -- is a friendly, familiar trope, the stuff of old romantic comedies, the anchor of the Depression-era Cinderella story. And there is “Hello, Dolly!”

Read the whole story here.

-- Robert Lloyd

(Photo: Patti Stanger, whose job it is to see the good in people, with client David Golshan. Credit: Evans Vestal Ward / Bravo)