The Will: A Bad Penny Always Turns Up

Within the first 20 minutes of CBS’s new reality show, The Will, it became immediately and horrendously obvious that Bill Long’s current wife, Penny, is a complete bitch.

In fact, we might as well just call her Bad Penny. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition (as found at Bartleby.com) says the phrase, “a bad penny always turns up,” means, “our mistakes return to haunt us,” and, “nasty people have a way of reappearing.” That seems to perfectly reflect Bad Penny in The Will. The only difference is that Bill made the mistake of marrying this shrew, and now she is haunting us, the viewers (not to mention poor Billy, Josh, Danielle, and Crystal).

I strongly suspect that, barring a miracle, Bad Penny will end up in the Reality TV Hall of Shame, however, we shouldn’t have to wait to discuss her evil behavior.

Let’s look at some of the things she did. First, we’ll start with history, when she married Bill and proceeded to tell his eighth-grade son that he was worthless and not part of the family. She claims that when he was 11, he talked about wanting to spend his father’s money after he died. OK, let’s for the moment presume that is true (and with her, who really knows). He was 11! While she might not have matured any since that age, most people do. Yet she continues to hold against him that alleged statement from when he was a kid.

Moving into the first episode, she told her employee/son’s ex-girlfriend Kristin that she should “prostitute herself” to get Bill’s friend Mickey over to their side. Perhaps that could be viewed as something she didn’t really mean – something said in the heat of a competition. Perhaps. If it were the only thing like that she’d said.

She admitted – nay, bragged – that she is an excellent manipulator who does it in her business and personal life, “with my family, with my friends…” You have to wonder if her business associates, customers, employees (other than the ones on the show), friends, and family not on the show were sitting there watching and wondering just how she had been manipulating them. Of course, we found out further that she knows exactly how to manipulate husband Bill, which she bragged about as well.

We also saw that Bad Penny is a raging hypocrite. Let’s look at a few of the instances we saw in the first 90 minutes of this show:

• Bad Penny plotted to avoid living up to the agreement she’d made with Josh, and then complained that Danielle had stabbed her in the back when she did the right thing by keeping Billy around.
• Bad Penny claimed that Billy is a lying, patronizing fake who will tell anybody what they want to hear – right after she told us that knows exactly what to tell Bill to get the advantage from him and after she admitted to manipulating everybody.
• Bad Penny verbally attacked Josh and accused him of not living up to his end of their deal when, in fact, he fully intended to do so and it was Bad Penny herself who had tried to avoid it.
• The kicker, of course, was when Bad Penny stormed into the boys’ room and threw her wine on Billy while saying he had no class.

But wait, there’s more! Not only is Bad Penny a bitch and a hypocrite, she’s a whiner too! When the ranch challenge was explained, Bad Penny complained that it wasn’t a fair test because only Josh and Billy had done ranch chores. Sounds like a perfectly fair test to find out who should win the ranch!

Then, when she was given a full minute’s head start and still came in dead last with her team on the ranch challenge, she announced for all to hear that it wasn’t a fair test, that it was rigged, wah wah wah. Somebody get her a crying towel. Oh, and of course she followed this up by refusing to attend (or let anybody else in her group attend) the Protected Heir Dinner.