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MTV's Catfish explores a range of online relationships

There’s a scene in the first American Pie where Jason Biggs’ character, desperate to land a prom date, creates a profile on a fictitious dating website. A year after the film’s release, eHarmony launched. Various competitors soon began creating rival matchmaking services, for everyone from older singles to unsatisfied married folk. Although not every hopeless romantic logs onto these sites, love is still in the air — albeit via ones and zeroes — through the billion-member megasite Facebook.

Taking the Sundance Film Festival by storm in 2010, the documentary Catfish chronicles the online relationship between Nev and his guitar-toting sweetheart Megan, whose eccentric family enthralls the audience. The pair’s budding romance blossoms thanks to a highly convoluted maze of friend requests, picture-swapping and convincing phone calls. The odd part? The pair never has a Skype call and attempts to meet face-to-face are met with constant rejections.

To make sense of this strange love affair, Nev and his camera-toting friends hightail it to Ishpeming, Mich. to uncover the truth behind this fascinating family. What they discover isn’t what they expected, and it brings to light an unsettling truth about the Web. Not everyone is who they say they are: They’re “catfish,” creating a fake social media profile to ensnare someone online.

MTV’s Catfish: The TV Show opens with a summary of the film’s events, and caps off the introduction with “Catfish: The Movie was my story … [this] is yours.” It makes for compelling reality TV, blending tech-savvy investigation with the unbridled absurdity of what viewers have to come to expect from the ill-named Music Television.

The show has aired eight episodes, which explore varying degrees of motivation for online love and the eyebrow-raising, sometimes sociopathic results that conclude the broadcasts. Underlying topics include struggles with sexuality, what it means to be transgender and the stinging pain of loneliness. These topics add another dimension to Catfish that isn’t always clear when tuning in each Monday.

Nev co-hosts the show with cameraman Max, whose purpose is to raise red flags at holes in these digital love stories. The gray-haired videophile serves as the voice of reason, something his friend Nev can’t grasp. They are a strange duo: a dreamer with an idyllic vision of romance and a skeptic with a stronger grip on reality.

It’s hard to believe the logged-on lovers the show follow don’t pick up on the inconsistencies in their relationships. The pilot tells of a dream boy who models by day, writes for Chelsea Lately by night and is enrolled in online classes to become an anesthesiologist. Come on. Who’s that incredible? I know what you’re thinking, and you’re far too kind. The conclusion of the episode reveals the person behind the enigmatic pretty boy was actually an 18-year old girl. Yikes.

Sadly, this is too familiar to regular viewers and leaves MTV maniacs glued to the set the following Monday, pining for a happy ending. It’s a surefire marketing technique, but it’s been irritating the fanbase, judging by the enormous volume of furious tweets that go as far as to attack the accounts of those involved that week.

As bitter and ridiculous as Catfish may seem, the show is far from exhausting its stockpile of stories. Nev has tweeted about the recent scandal surrounding Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o, and MTV is debuting older episodes for audiences in the U.K.

Whether you’re a seasoned viewer of reality TV or not, you’ll likely find something both fresh and familiar about Catfish. It hasn’t delivered its share of happy endings, but — pardon the pun — that’s the reality of it.

New episodes of Catfish air at 11 p.m. on MTV and are available the next day for free streaming at mtv.com. Get hooked.

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