TVSquad

Everybody knows Kendra as one of Hugh Hefner's former girlfriends. The one-time stars of E!'s The Girls Next Door have left the mansion and moved on to their own projects. Bridget Marquardt has moved on to her own Travel Channel show, Bridget's Sexiest Beaches, while Holly Madison was just on Dancing with the Stars. It looks like E! went the right route by choosing to follow the youngest and wackiest of the bunch, Kendra Wilkinson.

Her self-titled new show premiered Sunday on E!, and Kendra set a ratings high not seen since the premiere of The Anna Nicole Show in 2002 with 2.6 million viewers. People love their former Playmates, apparently. As an admitted follower of The Girls Next Door; my wife has a thing for all things Playboy and I got sucked in despite myself; Kendra was always the girl that I found the most annoying. She was so childish and superficial... and that laugh! Oh my god, that laugh made me want to reach through the screen and strangle her! So no one was more surprised than me to find that I actually enjoyed this premiere.

Bridget Marquardt is already traveling the world showing us Bridget's Sexiest Beaches on the Travel Channel. Now it's Kendra Wilkinson's turn. Easily the most annoying of The Girls Next Door, Kendra's new E! show will premiere this fall. Now that all the girls have left the mansion, it's time to see what's next for them. And for Kendra, who was only 18 when the show premiered, it's about time she learned how to be an adult who isn't pampered by the staff at the Playboy Mansion.

And that's just what her show, cleverly called Kendra, will do as she prepares for her wedding next month. My wife is a fanatic for The Girls Next Door, so I've seen more than my fair share of them, and the show is actually much sweeter than you'd expect. One of my questions was what they would do with it now that the girls have left the nest. Apparently, the show will continue and presumably feature Hef's new girlfriends, the twins (not those twins, though I'm sure they're featured as well; they really are twins!).

(S04E12) When I saw the promos for this episode, my heart sank. I really thought that this was going to be the standard sitcom "exes have a relapse and have to deal with it" trope that we've seen since at least Cheers. But I have to give Bays and Thomas credit; they put enough of a twist on the old game to make it entertaining. And they added a B-story that was light, but funny and relatable. More on that in a sec.

Back to the A-story. For the twist, we can thank Barney. And not just because he broke all those TVs.

I've been watching The Girls Next Door for a while and it presents such a quandary for me. I feel like I'm betraying the feminist movement every time I tune in. If I knew an old man who had relationships with multiple young girls and made them "kept women," I would think he's a sleaze ball and wouldn't want to have anything to do with him. However, I fully admit that I find The Girls Next Door fascinating.

It's probably because the life that's portrayed is so far beyond my frame of reference that I can hardly believe that it's real. In any case, I've been a semi-regular viewer and I've found myself even rooting for the girls. I want Bridget to finish school, and yes, I've even been rooting for Holly to get Hef to marry her. Well, I believe Bridget has gotten her Master's degree, and it seems like Holly may even get her wish too. Bridget was recently overheard dishing about a "huge wedding" coming up on the show.