“He’s a little rougher around the edges than my average client.” – Patti Stanger
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Fiona Forbes & Jack Roddy: client intros
After Patti Stanger records an episode of The Weekly Love Report podcast with “dating coach” David Wygant (who apparently founded The Millionaire’s Club?), Patti meets up with Mitch Berger and his wife Bambi, who we met back in the episode called Mitch Berger & Joe Moller (“The NFL Kicker and the Workaholic”).
Check out our full and snark-tastic Millionaire Matchmaker episode guide and updates! Trash and treasure in equal increments, we promise.
We’ve got an honest to the invisible sky wizard success story brewing on The Millionaire Matchmaker, people!
This quickly becomes a means for Mitch to “suggest” that Toronto TV host Fiona Forbes, who interviewed Patti once upon a time, should become a Millionaire’s Club client. Which means that we’ve just been introduced to Client #1 for the episode.
Back in the office, Patti screams at one of her underlings for stepping outside to make a phone call, and then turns to focusing on Client #2, Jack Roddy from Cleveland.
When Marissa turns on Jack’s intro video, Patti immediately screams in shock, “That’s a grandpa!” You know, pretending she had never seen or heard of the client her company was taking on before this segment was filmed by The Millionaire Matchmaker producers, get it?
Jack is 57 and worth $1.5 million, and describes himself as a “fire chaser by trade,” which means something about being in the fire insurance business. Meanwhile, Patti couldn’t care less as she’s going on about how he should go off to live in a retirement community in Florida or something.
Roddy also owns a bar and wants a relationship with someone who can be as comfortable hanging out at that bar as a country club, and also someone he can trust and depend on “no matter what.”
“He’s so rough” is Patti’s reaction to this.
Apparently, Jack has also been dating women in their 20s, so the staff has fun hashing over that as well.
We then turn to Fiona Forbes, who Patti describes as “beautiful and blonde and sexy in her 40s.” Turns out that Fiona is the host of a Vancouver-based TV news show called The Rush.
We learn that Fiona has focused on her career for many years, but now she’s ready for a serious relationship. Fiona is looking for someone smart and funny, and because she’s quite tall, she’d like her guy to be tall as well.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Fiona Forbes & Jack Roddy: Patti meets the clients
Fiona meets Patti at the office, and Patti seems to give herself a lot of credit for dubbing Fiona as a “shy extrovert” because she’s comfortable on television for a mass audience but gets shy in one-on-one situations (which is actually a pretty common phenomenon for many introverts, in fact).
Patti later muses about getting Fiona a vibrator “to get those wheels greased downstairs.” So I’ll just leave that there.
Patti meets Roddy at a bar called Chez Jay, and makes sure to mention that he’s “a little rougher around the edges than my average client.” She then backs up and agrees that blue collar people need love too… before offhandedly referring to her new client as an “old fart.”
We learn that Jack’s bar in Cleveland is called Kickin, and it’s frequented by “blue collar types” like plumbers and electricians.
He also defends his proclivity for dating much younger women, simply saying, “Who wouldn’t? On this topic, Patti asks him what these young women want from him. “Do they want daddy?” she says.
Everything’s based on money, Jack assures her, but he’s looking for a relationship that’s based on something more now. He’s also looking for honesty and self-sufficiency, as he was cheated on in the past – including with a woman in her 40s who he was engaged to.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Fiona Forbes & Jack Roddy: the recruiting session
The gimmick with the recruiting session this time around is called a Marriage Mirror, which really just means that Fiona and Jack will observe Patti and her underlings interviewing people on a monitor in a nearby room.
Highlights of the recruiting session include for Fiona include:
- Turns out Fiona is pretty funny. On David, who has a job in “estate maintenance”: “He looks like he’s going to murder people in one of those estates, am I wrong?”
- More on David the potential estate maintenance assassin: he’s open to dating different kinds of women, but specifically calls out that he won’t date women “in wheelchairs.”
- Fiona on Firas, a personal trainer with enormous arms: “He’s hiding two small people in his biceps.” Patti of course orders the dude to take his shirt off. More Fiona: “He has bigger boobs than me!” She has upgraded to hilarious.
- Meanwhile, Patti announces that she’s “getting a little wet downstairs” from interviewing the group of 40+ men. Thanks for sharing, Patti… but actually not.
Of the guys who showed up, Fiona is partial to James, an Englishman with an intriguing background: he’s an animal behaviorist who is also a “semi-professional” songwriter and singer. There’s no mixer in this installment, so Fiona and James – which sound like a couple made for a Disney animated flick – get to move straight on to their full-blown master date.
And as for Jack’s mixer:
- Mary Ann sells something called “the creator of the feeling blocks,” which is a communications tool for kids, apparently. Patti tells her that she seems “spiritual airy fairy.”
- Patti tells Melissa, a 44-year-old actress, that she’s “tool old” and therefore she’s “not gonna make it,” which might be close to the single most awful and cruel thing she’s ever uttered on The Millionaire Matchmaker (which is saying something).
- Patti inserts her 29-year-old underling Marissa as a “plant” (code name = Julia) to try and test to see if Jack is taking the process seriously versus continuing to go for age-inappropriate women.
- Annabell, 43, is a fashion designer who focuses on bathing suits. She was also a stunt designer for TV shows in Venezuela, which is kind of fascinating.
After a full round of interviews, Patti’s plan completely backfires as Jack becomes fixated on “Julia.” We hear him say “I like Julia the best so far” a solid half dozen times, before Patti finally melts down on him.
“You’re clearly not ready for women over 40!” she finally screams at him. Which, if you listened to the dude, he essentially told everyone from the jump.
Finally, Patti bulldozes him into taking Annette on a full master date. “She’s the right energy, the right age,” and so on, Patti says, comically scaling down from her peak of rage.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Fiona Forbes & Jack Roddy: Fiona and James’s first date
James takes Fiona, and James is cute in saying that she’s glad that she wore the wrong footwear (flip flops) so that she’s forced to hold James’s hand.
The two have an easy rapport during the walk, and it’s clear that these two are far more mature than the average people who end up on dates on The Millionaire Matchmaker.
Lunch overlooks a lovely vineyard, and Fiona tells James about her path to becoming a TV host and overcoming her natural shyness generally.
This segment ends quickly, and on an ambiguous note with James telling the camera that he thought that Fiona did indeed come across as a bit shy.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Fiona Forbes & Jack Roddy: Jack and Annette’s first date
Jack greets Annette, a dental hygienist, at a marina with a bouquet of flowers in hand and tells her that she looks “even more stunning than you did on TV,” meaning the monitors used to look in on the recruiting process.
The date entails going on a cruise around the marina in a large motor yacht. Watching the two of them together, the first instinctual reaction is that Jack looks far older than Annette (even with all of Patti’s machinations).
Annette’s initial reaction to Jack when getting interviewed: “So far he has talked a lot.” And not just “a lot,” but she also feels that he’s an over-sharer at this stage, as Jack spoke openly about how he’s been sober for 17 years and about his ex-wife.
A sushi lunch is then served on the yacht by Chef Devin Alexander. When Jack segued into talking about how he sees a lot of dead cats on his job, I felt fully confident that this relationship was heading directly to Nowheresville.
Then perhaps even worse, Annette tells the camera, “He reminds me of my dad.” And I’m thinking that’s meant in not the good way. And then, “It’s just getting a little weird… but I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
When Jack asks her out again, she turns him down, saying that she doesn’t see a future with him. Jack is pleasant about the rejection, but then quickly adds that she wasn’t his first choice.
“That’s kind of a dickish move right now, isn’t it?” Annette responds, smiling.
Pretty perfect response, I’d say.
The Millionaire Matchmaker, Fiona Forbes & Jack Roddy: post-dates upshot
Patti and David call James, who relays that while he thinks that Fiona is pretty and friendly, the vibe he picked up was a “friendship vibe.” He added upon prompting that she could have perhaps been a little flirtier had she been interested in him romantically.
However, when Fiona gets called via video chat, she relays almost the exact same sentiment about the date that James did.
Patti’s advice for future dates: “Bring on the flirt, girl.”
The next call is with Annette. She talks about how while Jack was kind at the beginning of the date, that things first went sideways and then downhill by the end.
“You can’t teach Mr. AARP a new trick,” Patti says.
Upon calling Jack, he’s immediately defensive and, to use Annette’s word, dickish.
“I’ll tell you,” he says to Patti and an underling. “I found a cure for insomnia. She was boring.”
Soon Patti and Jack are screaming at each other, with Jack indignant that Annette wasn’t his “real pick.”
Patti screams back about Jack not “being able to get laid” and ends on, “You’re f—ing out of the club!”
Thus ends another installment of The Millionaire Matchmaker.
The end of episode captions then tell us: “Fiona has kept in touch with James, they are becoming fast friends. When she meets her next dream guy, she’ll have the confidence to approach him.” And: “Jack Roddy has returned to Cleveland, alone. He has resumed looking for ‘a girl like Julia.’”
Some stats and info about The Millionaire Matchmaker – “The Shy Extrovert and The Rescuer”
TV SHOW – The Millionaire Matchmaker
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 7, Episode 7
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – Bravo
AIR DATE – January 16th, 2014
GENRE – Reality TV, Dating Shows, Trashtastic TV
STARS – Patti Stanger, Fiona Forbes, Jack Roddy
GOOGLE PLAY DESCRIPTION – Fiona Forbes is a 40-something Toronto TV host who finds Patti via her friend, NFL player Mitch Berger, who met his wife through Patti on an episode of “The Millionaire Matchmaker.” Although Fiona makes her money being an extrovert on TV, she is very shy and keeps to herself when it comes to her personal life. Can Patti get Fiona out of her shell long enough to meet Mr. Right? Patti’s second millionaire this week is 57-year-old Jack Roddy. Jack is a fire insurance salesman who grew up on the streets of Cleveland. Since his marriage ended years ago, he has been dating a string of young women who are always in need of help, and Patti dubs him the “Rescuer.” Can Patti get him to look past the 20-somethings he has grown accustomed to “saving” and find an age-appropriate woman that he will want to settle down with?