I am going to exercise super-human restraint and confine my comments to wondering why the hell the damn producers were unable to dig into their designer jeans and $3000 handbags and scrape together $6000.
OK edit. of course I am not going to be able to stick to that.
I will try to avoid speculating why the dude at the club chose to have Tanisha arrested, or why the popo agreed to do so, because frankly, situations like that are just going to be viewed so very differently by different people, according to their own life experiences, realities, cultural contexts and truths, that it is just one of those unbridgeable gaps, and even a detailed discussion of its unbridgeability is more suited to other forums and venues.
Nor am I going to express a great deal of surprise at the behavior and choices made by the other girls in the wake of Tanisha's arrest, although I will have to say that I do have more respect for Cordelia than I ever thought I would.
But back to the producers. Tanisha has made money for them. A lot of money. $6000 to a TV production company is pretty much petty cash.
There is no question that it made for much better TV to leave this 24 year old girl whose only claim to "badness" consists of anger management issues that manifest themselves, at their worst, at screaming at people rhythmically while banging pans together, to languish in a "holding cell" for three days than if someone from the production company had gone down there and caused phone calls to be made, and money to change hands, and gotten her back, if not to the house, on a plane back home to Brooklyn, but out of jail.
Granted the best they could have hoped for would be Tanisha coming into the house and yelling. But that is for next episode.
By leaving her in jail they can get a whole load of really good footage, new stuff, because Lord knows we have all seen Tanisha yell at the other girls, so what would be fresh and new about that?
A business decison. Nothing personal. Just a nightmare that this girl will carry for the rest of her life.
I guess I could argue that it is good to learn certain lessons, establish certain nightmares, earlier in life than later.
Tanisha knows things now that she may have suspected before, but in her young girl's heart, probably secretly hoped were not really true. Or if they were true, that they were getting better.
Maybe she even secretly hoped that as long as she did not do certain things, certain things would not happen to her.
Well, she knows better now. She joins millions of other young folks, some much younger than her, who know better.
And just how is that working out for us all?