The Pick-Up Artist 2 Reviewed In The Wall Street Journal

A second season of “The Pickup Artist” begins on VH1 Sunday (10-11 p.m. ) and no hour of TV this week can be more joyfully spent. Ostensibly, this is a show about how to attract women, following the “scientific method” developed by a professional picker-upper known as Mystery (aka Erik von Markovic). Its wider appeal is as pure theater, where a colorful cast does the oldest dance on earth.

With his ponytail, piercings, dark-painted fingernails and outlandish clothing, Mystery is not every woman’s cup of tea. Nature did not even endow him with a deep, manly voice. Yet as he and legions of devotees seem to have discovered, almost any guy can get into the game with just a few simple gambits. Like it or not, the basic strategy is sound: Make the beautiful girls feel insecure (they will respect you for it because most guys drool over them) and make all the others feel safe.

The real point, though, is to make men feel confident. On stage for training by Mystery, and as entertainment for us, are an assortment of young men so inept and unappealing, so geekish and freakish, that they seem beyond hope. Even after hair and apparel makeovers to erase the worst of their self-inflicted flaws, the essential nerdiness of these guys is verging on tragic, even as we laugh at them like the mean girls surely did in high school.

Perhaps their neediness is exaggerated for the show, but not entirely. When Mystery tells his charges that after training with him, they will one day be able to teach their sons the same skills. The looks on those suddenly hopeful faces could not easily be faked: Our sons! We will indeed become men!

Mystery is not the only instructor on the show, giving tips on dressing for success: “Do you look like the type of men that are sexually active?” There is wingman Matador, who appears to have raided the costume archive of “The Quest for Fire.” The mind boggles as we see (via hidden camera) women in a bar lining up to stroke his fur vest and nuzzle this 21st century hunter-gatherer.

“It’s like watching lions in a shepherd’s den!” an excited trainee exclaims approvingly. As wingwoman Tara certainly knows, however, the sheep can take care of themselves.

Excerpted from wjg.com. View entire article here.