So I actually watched this ages ago and meant to write a bit about it, but I never did. I did, however, pull up a few links about it... which have been sitting among my Firefox tabs for the last few months. And I'd like to clear them now, so I'll say a bit about the program!

Back in... September, I guess, Mom was flipping through channels and we came across Too Ugly For Love on BBC America. I wasn't really sure what it was about at first -- they were just following this guy around who thought he was so ugly that he couldn't be seen in public without sunglasses. And yeah, he was kinda ugly. Not hideously so, mind you -- you probably wouldn't even give him a second glance on the street -- but he certainly wasn't Brad Pitt. Anyway, I didn't understand why he was so convinced of his horrific ugliness, especially since I couldn't imagine the sunglasses doing all that much unless they were hiding hanging Slobulus eyeballs.

So the program's host kept trying to get the guy to take off the glasses and he kept refusing, and after a while Mom got bored and left -- but I kept watching the program because I really wanted to see what the heck was so terrible about this guy's eyes. He never took the glasses off, but the program did move on to two other people who also suffer from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), which causes people to obsess about perceived defects in their physical appearance (whether they exist or not). One of them wouldn't be seen at all -- and I'd believe that she actually was hideous, given that she'd gone through so many plastic surgeries that one more would cause her nose to rot (R.I.P. Michael Jackson) -- but the other was actually kinda pretty... so it was weird to hear her talk about how overwhelmingly unattractive she is. She even drew this weird picture of how she sees herself, though admittedly there might have been some truth to it -- given the exaggerated features down the center of the face, it looked like one's appearance in the mirror if one gets really, really close to it. Quite literally, this woman needed to pull back to get some perspective.

I don't really have any nifty insights about Too Ugly for Love -- it was just an odd and somewhat annoying program, since the interviewer was arguably dicking around with these people and sometimes seemed to be making fun of them in that very dry way that oblivious people might miss... and since the people (surgery girl notwithstanding) were hardly as ugly as they seemed to find themselves. This reviewer, however, had much harsher things to say about the program and its spotlighted individuals.

Also, since the ugly eyes man avoided people to the point of not working, what I really wanted to know how he made money. Is BDD considered a disability, such that the British government gives him benefits? 'Cause in a way that'd be kinda neat -- I can imagine a modern story in which Quasimodo lives in a furnished flat and spends his days watching CNN instead of being confined to a bell tower.

So that's three tabs down out of... dozens. Let's clear one more: Mariana Davalos is definitely not too ugly for love.