Cute, but not Rico's type, sorry

Alessandra Stanley has an article in The New York Times about male prostitutes:

It’s almost impossible to watch Gigolos, a bluntly pornographic Showtime reality series about male prostitutes who cater exclusively to women and not be distracted with illicit thoughts of release forms.
Who in the world are these seemingly ordinary people— nurses, teachers, and I.T. workers— who consent to have cameras record their sexual and legal deviances? Even more than Cathouse, an HBO series that took an explicit look at real-life activity at a legal Nevada brothel, the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, Gigolos stretches credulity.
But when so many people prostitute themselves for fame, it’s only logical that a few will frequent prostitutes for it. Gigolos isn’t the most X-rated show on cable, but it may be one of the crudest reminders that there really is nothing some people won’t do to be on television.
Of course prostitution is about fantasy, which is to say it’s about lying. Secret Diary of a Call Girl, a Showtime drama that has its fourth-season premiere  just before Gigolos, feeds the male delusion that women become hookers because they love the sex. Gigolos, which directly follows it, posits male escort services that are available only to women.
It’s not unheard of for women to pay for sex but, if Internet ads are any indication, the market looks a whole lot stronger for gay male escorts. So a look at women-only gigolos in Las Vegas is a little like a cooking show devoted entirely to vegan steak recipes. Chefs can do wonders with wheat gluten, but seitan is hardly what most people think of when they think of steakhouses, or male prostitutes with names like 'Brace'.
Showtime deserves some credit for creative casting. The producers of Gigolos somehow found camera-ready clients like Rodney and Allure, a middle-aged couple who pay Jimmy to have sex with Allure while Rodney, and the audience, watch. “It’s my birthday,” Allure explains. All sorts of clients submit quite eagerly to decidedly explicit and unromantic depictions of sexual intercourse.
Samantha, a cheerful photographer’s assistant from Minnesota, hires Jimmy so she can explore her urge to, as she puts it, “control a man and deny him any happiness”. (It turns out she means handcuffs, not marriage.*) And Freya, a nurse, hires four men to service her at once, though at the last minute one of them is repelled and refuses to join in.
It’s not so surprising that the five men who were selected as the stars of Gigolos would boast that they sell themselves for sex. The episodes are edited to highlight their paper-thin bravado but, even so, the camera can’t disguise an unsettling desperation, a visible yearning to make all those sordid couplings with strangers somehow pay off. Some stars of reality shows do find fame and fortune, but there is something so seedy about most of these men, a weariness and a weirdness that suggests there can be no Snooki or Bethenny Frankel second act, spinoff, or book contract in their future.
Brace, the oldest in the group, sports spiky, bleached blond hair and a Boehner-orange tan. He has already seen the expiration date in the mirror and is trying to find investors to help market the anti-aging product line he calls Ageless Nutraceuticals. He is a sad case, but so is Steve, a failed model who has a five-year-old son and claims he sells himself to cover his child support. “I would do anything for my son,” he says with a sickly smile. “Anything, and anyone.”
Jimmy, Nick, and Vin appear a little healthier, but even their efforts to make it all seem like a Las Vegas lark seems forced, whether it’s meeting for cocktails in a bar or boutique hopping. Viewers are supposed to invest in their camaraderie, but there isn’t much chemistry or even joie de vivre in the group. It doesn’t help that the show begins with their manager, Garren James, a sleazy-looking man in a limousine who boasts: “I own and operate the largest straight-male escort companion company in the United States.” He is really there to explain how the fig leaf of legality works, telling Vin that the money he takes from clients is for his company; anything they do later, privately and as consenting adults, is his own business.
It was perhaps only a matter of time that someone would take the premise of Hung, an HBO show about a male prostitute, and turn it into a reality show. But this isn’t a semi-straight, somewhat X-rated version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It’s closer in spirit to the MTV dating reality series, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, a competition that mainly made a spectacle of the roadkill of show business. And maybe that’s why the producers didn’t use the famous Louis Prima hit Just a Gigolo as the theme song. The lyrics are too apt:

There will come a day
Youth will pass away
Then what will they say
About me?
When the end comes I know
They’ll say “Just a gigolo”
As life goes on, without me.

Rico says he'd leave it at just "it’s almost impossible to watch Gigolos". (But the line: "it turns out she means handcuffs, not marriage."? Rico loves snide, and that's a classic.)