by Tim Peters

Created on: July 20, 2009

If Flavor Flav jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? Probably not, unless your name happens to be Bret Michaels. Flavor of Love, a dating/competition show on VH1 infamous for featuring probably the last women and man most people would ever want to date, became famous for one reason and one reason only: Flavor Flav. His insane ramblings, lecherous pursuits, and humorous revulsion made the show impossible to miss. Rock of Love is basically the same format, except with aging Poison frontman Bret instead of aging Public Enemy frontman Flav, and trashy rock groupies instead of trashy rap groupies. There's just one problem: Bret Michaels is no Flavor Flav.

Rock of Love, Rock of Love 2, and Rock of Love: Bus Tour all have the same basic premise, with women (usually at least half his age) hand-picked by Bret Michaels vying to become the object of his affection. What kind of women would want to fall in love with a man who wears leopard-print cowboy hats and tank tops? The answer is a bit surprising. There are the usual party animals, the attention-seekers, the celebrity wannabes, and the outright headcases. But then there are women who seem incredibly well-adjusted and intelligent, except that they're in love with Bret Michaels. When 20 of these various personalities are put together in a house (or on tour buses in Season 3), it goes as well as you'd expect.

Not only is there partying, fooling around (with Bret and each other in a few cases), and a few trips to the hospital, there's also plenty of fighting. Sometimes the fighting is a knock-down drag-out brawl, while other times there are arguments over all sorts of things. But at all times, Bret Michaels runs the show. For his part, Bret shows both surprising wit and unsurprising crudeness, sometimes at the same time. He clearly enjoys fooling around with every woman he can find, yet wants to find love. He talks about needing depth and meaning, yet never thinks twice about eliminating people for spurious reasons. And he enjoys putting watching women play football in mud, yet pampers himself to a degree that even the most metrosexual men would balk at.

Perhaps that's not the whole story, but it's from the same lens Bret puts himself and his love life under without a second thought, under the pretense of it being a stress test for life dating a C-list celebrity. Yet amazingly, at the end of all this, he actually might have accomplished something no one else on VH1's dating shows has ever accomplished:

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