14 DAY TRIAL // Dean McDermott just dropped a bomb in a new interview with Access Hollywood Live: once the second season of True Tori, his and wife Tori Spelling’s Lifetime docuseries, wraps, he won’t be shooting any more episodes. He’s done.
You can see the interview in the video below, along with his explanation for the decision. To sum it up in just a few words, he’s had just about enough of the criticism and the hate, and he can’t bear to expose any more of his personal life on camera.
He hints that the thing that got him thinking about leaving was the moment when Tori wanted him to get a vasectomy on camera, more or less. That was shown in last week’s episode.
Too painful an experience
Also last week, after another wave of criticism for going to an adult toys store while his wife was in hospital, Dean went on a foul-mouthed rage on Twitter and quit social media, saying he didn’t need to have this kind of negativity in his life, just as he thought things were getting better.
Then, the other day, he told E! in an interview that he was hurt people were so mean to him when he was doing the reality show mostly because he wanted to “help others” by opening up about his personal experiences with addiction and depression.
Today, he admits that the negativity he seems to generate at all times is just one part of the reason he’s quitting the show, with the most significant one being played by his finding it impossibly difficult to relive the painful experiences on the show.
It’s one thing to open up when there’s a camera crew around, because you get used to it, he argues. It’s an entirely different one to do it all over again a few weeks later, when the episode in question airs and you have to promote it and talk about all those things again, even if you decide not to watch it when it airs.
“I can't do this anymore,” Dean explains. “I can't keep opening a vein, opening my soul and sharing my feelings and thoughts and demons with the world.”
Stepping back from the project already
So, Dean won’t be back for a third season of True Tori, he says flat-out. Tori might want to continue with the show, but as far as he’s concerned, he’s achieved all he wanted to achieve already and there’s really no need for him to go through this personal hell.
He admits that he’s executive producer on the series but that he’s already stepped back considerably with season 2, because he’s simply “too close” to what’s shown on camera to be in any position to do his executive producer job as he should.
He also teases a more detailed explanation to be included in one of the upcoming episodes.
Twisting the truth once more
What Dean is saying makes sense, but there is a very good chance that he’s only taking preemptive action, planning ahead. No matter how he tries to spin it, True Tori isn’t doing all that great in the ratings: neither the first season nor the current one did wonders for Lifetime.
In fact, the first one had such an underwhelming performance that even fans were surprised when they heard Lifetime had greenlit a second one, because the figures simply didn’t justify this kind of financial investment.
So, when Dean is saying that he’s not doing season 3, he’s probably doing it because he knows there won’t be one. This way, he chivalrously offers Tori a way out in the media: there is no season 3 because she couldn’t go on without her husband.
The second possibility is that he’s trying to stir up more drama by scaring Lifetime into offering him more money. However, for that to work, he’d have to be a much hotter commodity for the network than he is, so our money is on theory number 1 because it’s also in keeping with Dean’s MO of always twisting the truth to suit his current situation.
What do you think?