The problem was with Ayiiiiiiia. How do you solve a problem like Ayiiiia? How do you catch a frown and ask it to leave the house? No one knows.

This episode was one of those ones that's edited to such a weird degree that you can't really tell what's what or when's when. As the vomit-splattered curtain was drawn back on the scene last night, Emily and Ayiiiia and Shabazzle were getting along famously. They were riding pennyfarthing bicycles down by the arcade. They were flying kites and going to kissing booths and eating cotton candy and doing this and doing all of this stuff and it was summertime every minute of every day, just breezes and balms. Everyone was so happy!

Except Johnnay. Johnnay wasn't happy because she was sitting up on the deck, her black hair matted in nest-like snarls atop her little round marble head, staring down at the three frolicking ladies and seething. But she didn't care, she didn't care that they were having the best time of their lives, that they were becoming Sistahs with a capital SISTAHS, because she had the boys. She had tumble-topped Binky with his suspicious accent, creepy-faced Bronne with his bleary creeper features, that gay one, and Melody, the tattooed rocker hunk with chestnutty good looks and a badass attitude. She has all of them! So she doesn't need Ayiiiia or Emily or Mafarffle. And they don't need her.

So the house was divided and everyone was drunk so they couldn't stand. While at the club one night, Ayiiiia decided to up and leave and everyone got worried because this is downtown Mexico where the national pastime is gringo abduction and the official currency is crumpled twenties covered in blood. After 45 minutes of looking and yelling her name for a while ("Ayiiiia! Ayiiiiiiiia!" it sounded like Japanese soldiers dying in comic books from World War II), they finally found her standing on the street. Now if your roommates had been looking for you and had been worried that you were going to wind up mostly dead in the back of a rusted-out El Camino, you'd naturally do what Ayiiiiia did, I think. Which was yell at them. She got mad that they'd been worried and looking for her. Because... that makes complete sense I guess. So we started to see some cracks in the Ayiiiia veneer there.

This didn't stop the three girlyfriends from hanging out though. Mad that Johnnay had gone to lunch with the boys one day, they decided to go out club dancing without her. Just Ayiiiia and Emily and Verdell. So they went and drank fizzy drinks and the lights swirled and Emily saw Ayiiiia there across the way, grinding her hips into the air, her horsey bucks and thrusts hypnotic in their crassness. So when the ladies got home, sprawling down the stairs in their pointy boots and pointier features, Ayiiiiia and Emily left Gargamel twirling in the kitchen and went to bed. They went to bed, not to sleep. If you catch my meaning. If you're picking up what I'm laying down. What I mean to say is... I'm pretty sure that Emily and Ayiiia from The Real World: Cancun had sexual relations with each other after their girls' night out. So.

Sistahs were totally bonded! Everything was peachy keen! Except nothing was peachy keen. See while the three weird sisters were friendies, Johnnay was still hulking off in the perimeter, like Sirius Black in dog form. And as she stewed in her lonely juices, she riled up the dumb boys, who were just off in a corner hooting and throwing their feces around and drinking and annoying Emily. Dark clouds began to form in Em's eyes and the Earth began to tremble ever so slightly. But no one noticed, not yet. But soon they would.

Because they are nice or vain or probably both, the straight boys Binky and Bronne agreed to escort Derek to a gay bar for gay people. The gay bar in Cancun was basically like any other bar in Cancun except it was full of mens and only a scattered handful of women—those that just wanted to dance and not be bothered, those that needed the reassuring touch of a man but couldn't find it in Straightville. Bronne had asked Derek to "gay him up as hard as he could," which I half-chuckled at and thought That could make a could joke but really it's just too flat and boring. Gay me up real hard. Hardee hard hard. Bronne. Bronne was that guy you knew in college who was always just trying a little too hard. Wanted to be the party animal and the ladykiller and brah's brah and all that but was never quite sure how to do it, and you could tell that he was wildly reinventing himself from some nerdy obscurity he toiled in in high school and you sorta felt bad for him so you tolerated him and let him hang around but the more and more he pushed and pushed and pushed the more you got angry at him and eventually you just ditched him forever because oh holy God it was worth being an asshole and losing karma points because now he's gone and won't bother you and ahh blessed relief. Remember that dude? That is Bronne. It's sad.

ANYWAY. Nothing remarkable happened at the gay nightclub for gay people except that on the way back Derek got caught by a groundskeeper for peeing in the bushes and the small fellow tried to take him to apologize to the manager but Derek deftly eluded him by saying "No, I was just vomiting" and then making throw-up noises and motions. Blehhh Blehhhh! he went. And I felt bad for the teeny tiny Mexican man who was just trying to do his job, but really, son? Peeing in the bushes merits an awkward sitdown with the manager? This is Can-motherhumpin'-cun, friendo! The bushes must be practically made of pee at this point. Let it slide, dude. Just let it slide.

So the boys were supes drunks that night and when they woke up at 8 am, for a very important Student City business conference that involved ziplines and seal kissing, they were still drunk. Melody really wanted to be on time so he started bellowing the time to everyone and Bronne just acted cray-zay (it was just so exhausting to watch) and Emily started clawing at the walls and eventually she exploded into a furious ball of boy hating and screaming. The boys were not scared of her rage, just bemused by it, so they kept egging her on and she got madder and madder and when they finally got to the Student City Sitting In a Hammock Leadership Conference, she refused to participate in any of their reindeer games. She was mad at her roommates so she decided to punish herself with no fun zipline rides. I don't get it.

ANYWAY. Emily was also kinda mad at her once beloved Ayiiiia, because when the shit hit the fan with the boys, only brave Mulligatawny was woman enough to stand at her side and fight. Ayiiiia, on the other hand, just disappeared into an occluding smoke and mist of mutters and bleeped swears, carrying on some fight with herself and maybe other people, it was hard to tell. Whatever it was, Emily felt it was a Reason Why Not to like Ayiiiiia anymore. So being a mature individual, she decided to just not talk to her anymore. Like, really, she just blatantly ignored direct questions. She and Bilbao finally made friends with the boys and Johnnay again, and Emily apologized for being a bitchy bitch because it's not nice to be that way when you live with people for a TV show.

Ayiiiia sat alone in a hammock, sticking pins into little Melody-shaped dolls.

Back at the ranch, Ayiiia was stomping around and starting fights with people. She shoved Binky down a flight of stairs for no good reason. Derek came up and tried to give her a hug, so Ayiiiia ran him through with a curtain rod. He slumped over dead. Melody came walking by, singing a song, and she based a priceless Ming vase over his head. Ker-thunk. Johnnay was in another room entirely, doing her knitting, but Ayiiiiia closed her eyes really really tight and focused really really hard and suddenly Johnnay felt a pain in her head and then fell over, perished. Suffices to say, Ayiiiiia was in a bad mood. But then she made a critical error. She started some shit with Schlimazel. Their fight went like this:

AYIIIIA: Let's get in a fight, but don't be attitudey.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude? Who's got attitude?

AYIIIIA: You've got attitude.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude? I've got attitude?

AYIIIIA: Attitude: You've got it.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude?

AYIIIIA: Attitude.

SCHLIMAZEL: Attitude.

That was a verbatim transcription. They just said the word attitude back and forth for ten minutes and then both stormed away. Later Shlomo was bitching to Emily about their newfound Enemy and said Enemy was caught lurking behind curtains, listening. It was like that movie The Lives of Others except in this case instead of a conflicted East German Stasi officer listening in on a playwright, it was a stupid girl named Ayiiiia who won an online contest to be on a reality show standing behind a curtain in Cancun. But they're close relatives!

Finally the two lovers, dim Emily and rabid Ayiiiiiia, got in the spat to end all spats, shrieking and caterwauling while the other roommates milled about the living room like Sims that you don't control, they're part of some other person's game, and finally Ayiiiia said "At least I wasn't fucking adopted!!!" and ... oh dear, Ayiiiiiia. Just oh dear.

So that was basically the end of Ayiiiiia. All the other roommates were happy as clams, and decided to play kings. When they got to 9 Bust a Rhyme, Crickets or Fallujah or Jasmine or Attitudes or whatever her name is said both "cat" and "hat" which is really annoying because she took two words when she only needed one.

ANYWAY. Ayiiiiia went to go drink wine on the porch by herself. Which, all things being equal, is not a bad way to spend an evening. Watching the Mexican waves roll in while sipping wine and not having to go to work or pay bills or do anything unpleasant tomorrow. But when you're roommates are inside doing waterfalls and 2 For Yous and hating you, I guess it's a sad thing to be doing. So I guess Ayiiiia might go home. Pity.

What is it, though, about these contest winners? They never work out! Remember that fool from the Hollywood season a couple years back? Man that guy was a DISASTER. I mean, Ayiiiia sorta worked for a little while—she even did a lady!—but I guess it had to come to this. Yelling for no reason and then lonely porch drinking. Maybe the end came in the beginning, when she started bitching about dishes. It's never a good idea to bitch about dishes on this show. It just never works out well.

ANYWAY.

Here:

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The Good Stuff

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Weeds; June 8th, 10pm
Showtime's hit comedy, about Mary Louise Parker the suburban mommy pot dealer, regained any momentum it lost during the Albert Brooks period by shacking Nancy up with a deadly but lovable Mexican politician cum drug lord and deepening the stakes with a life-saving pregnancy plot twist at the very, very end of last season. Plus, Silas'll probably take his shirt off a lot more, and we might finally get to see where, if anywhere, the undeniable Nancy/Andy chemistry could lead. Almost as much summertime fun as just actually getting stoned.

Top Chef Masters; June 10th, 10pm
Basically the same thing as regular Top Chef, except with food world superstars rather than wannabes. You won't get the same disaster quotient you get on the o.g. version, but that's probably actually a good thing. Bravo's once proud (and dwindling) fleet of competition series have begun relying too heavily on wackadoo personalities rather than on talent, so maybe this is the ideal corrective. Sure they may have out-there, annoying personalities, but we're pretty much guaranteed they're all gonna be competent.

True Blood; June 14th, 9pm
HBO's kitschy vampire series started off wildly uneven last season, veering from scary-sexy to scary-stupid in the middle of episodes. But it eventually found its deep-fried Southern Gothic stride, with clever storytelling and ever-deepening characters gushing out of every orifice. And, yes, Anna Paquin is ungodly annoying, thus rendering the show's central relationship something of a bore, but she's more than made up for by the dangerously sexy Ryan Kwanten, the filthy-fascinating Nelsan Ellis, and the as-yet-unexplored-but-still-intriguing lesbodrone that is Michelle Forbes. As entertaining a show as one could want during the hot 'n sticky months. [See Ed. note below]

Mad Men; August sometime, 10pm
AMC has two of the best shows on television right now, and this is their flagship (the other is the fabulous Breaking Bad). When we last left the worried Don Draper, he was staring down dual abysses—his swiftly unknotting past, and the disappearing of everything the late 1950s promised the 60s would be. Poor Betty has problems of her own to deal with (oh dear, a baby), and of course there's that whole Pete/Peggy thing (oh dear, a baby), and the unsettling matter of Joan's rape. Not exactly light summer fare any of it, but compelling, beautifully detailed, oddly menacing capital a Art nonetheless.

The Maybes

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Nurse Jackie; June 8th, 10:30pm
The first episode Showtime's new Edie Falco vehicle is actually already on demand, and we gave it a watch last night. While Edie Falco (who plays the acidic-yet-warm, painkiller-addicted title nurse) could basically recite tax code and make us swoon, we're not so sure about everything around her. Medical shows are really hard to make original at this point, no matter how many gratuitous swear words and sex references you throw into the pot. Peter Facinelli's Dr. Asshole is basically a (slightly) grownup version of the Asshole he played so many years ago in Can't Hardly Wait and the good-lookin' Haaz Sleiman couldn't really find his way through the dense thicket of ooh-snap girlfriend gay stuff the writers gave him in the pilot. Points, though, go to theater goddess Eve Best and sadsack Merritt Wever for handling their barely sketched-out roles with aplomb. We'll keep watching for now, but we're cautious.

Hung; June 28th, 10pm
HBO's show about a man (The Sweetest Thing's vaguely annoying Thomas Jane) who has an enormous penis and becomes gigolo has a great supporting cast (including the underrated Anne Heche and the vastly underused Jane Adams), but that premise... If it's funny/sad, we're into it. If it's funny/gross, we didn't like Californication the first time, so why would we like it grosser?

10 Things I Hate About You; July 7th, 8pm
We love ABC Family for Greek, but hate it for The Secret Life of the American Teenager. So we're not really sure where the hell we fall on 10 Things. The movie on which it's based was a tart little surprise of a teen flick, but the small screen cast seems, frankly, nowhere near as attractive or interesting as a lineup of Heath Ledger, Joe Gordon-Levitt, Gabrielle Union, and Alex Mack. That Larry Miller stuck around to keep playing the overprotective dad of Kat and Bianca (yes, like in Taming of the Shrew) might indicate that there's some quality poking through the formula holes. We're curious to find out for sure.

For When Our Brains Are Mush

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.NYC Prep; June 23rd, 10pm
The Bravo show is this. Just spoiled rich New York City kids—the real-life Gossip Girls. It'll probably make you want to drink, so good thing it's summer and that's when drinking is forgiven, even encouraged. So pour that wine into a big ol' tumbler full of ice and sip deep. Or shallow. You know.

The Real World: Cancun; June 24th 10pm
Yes, it's happening. MTV has decided to sacrifice seven not-at-all-virgins to appease vengeful Montezuma. They'll go wandering through the jungles of the urban Yucatan, figuring out what happens when people stop being polite and start vomiting body shots into each other's belly buttons. Bad boy rocker Joey (from fuckin' Lawrence, Mass kid) and contest-winner Ayiiia (yes, three i's) are stone fox boombalotties, plus there's lots of weeping in the trailer, so... sigh. We're stoked, dude.

Wipeout; Wednesdays at 8pm
People falling down was pretty funny last summer. We're hoping the charm hasn't worn off. Don't fail us, ABC.

OK, that's it. The Boston Globe has an easy list of everything else. So go! Watch TV and have fun and enjoy the silly summer pleasures. But also be sure to get outside once in a while and experience all that the sweltering season has to offer. Like, um... Drinking outside. Or drinking on the beach. Those are sort of the same things, huh?

Oh well.

Editor's note: True Blood, like other TV shows (even some mentioned in this very post!), is a Gawker advertiser. Their campaign, though, includes sponsored posts via Bloodcopy.com, which when it was introduced generated some discussion in the media about media. So here is the boring disclosure: Those Bloodcopy posts are written by the advertising department. Editorial posts are written independent of who advertises; we might endorse, trash or simply ignore TV shows that happen to advertise. And that's why you keep a bright line separating the editorial and advertising in the first place, kids.

Top pic via Getty

The company, which has produced all 257 seasons of Real World as well as other reality dreck, has put an ad on EntertainmentCareers.net looking for a "FULL TIME" production accountant for an as-yet-unnamed reality series filming in the Beltway area:

Really this makes complete sense. Ever since Barry O. came shuffling up to politics, his groundswell populist hat in hand, DC is a cool, inspiring, exciting place to be. You couldn't have been a bigger square in squaresville if you lived and worked in the city during Bush's millennium kick-off reign of terror. But now everyone wants in. The cast mates could be, like, political volunteers or something! Imagine the effect! The change! The hope!

The moment in question comes when King Of The Friars, Jeffrey Ross, launched into one of his trademark "roast" bits and started putting the screws to Real World punching bag Puck. In what can only be described as a overly macho and HGH-fueled show of support, a few fully lubricated meatheads who we didn't even recognize (save for CT) unexpectedly bumrushed Ross and tossed the unsuspecting comedian into the pool below for his transgressions against the King Of The Snot Rocket. From the look on Ross' face, this moment was clearly unscripted.

For us, this moment represented everything that has gone wrong with the show in the last three or so years. While the composition of the cast has always included a few instigator types, the battles used to be fought on the psychological level, not the physical. The popularity and watchability of the loveable lunkhead Brad led the RW casting directors to fill future casts with aspiring Abercrombie & Fitch catalog models, all of whom also doubled as alcoholics-in-training. Much like pouring water on the back of Gizmo, a bunch of wannabe Brads were spawned after that San Diego season, and Jeffrey Ross felt their wrath last night.

• Real World Awards Bash [MTV.com]