If you’re a Teen Mom fan … well, it’s been a bit of a week, hasn’t it?
We’ve finally got a premiere date and a trailer for the new season of Teen Mom 2, and on Monday night we got to see the season finale of Teen Mom OG.
And while we’re pretty pumped about Teen Mom 2, there’s simply no denying that in these circles, that finale is all anyone is talking about.
Specifically, the scenes involving Ryan Edwards.
Ryan’s behavior was shocking enough to attract more attention than Amber Portwood being held back from beating the hell out of Matt Baier, which is really saying something.
Like, Amber literally called Matt an “ugly-ass old motherf-cker little dick bitch,” and still, no one cares.
It just goes to show you how alarming Ryan’s behavior really was.
Of course, most of the attention is going to the scene in which he drives himself and Mackenzie to their impromptu wedding ceremony while visibly impaired.
And by “visibly impaired,” we mean “very, very high.”
He began nodding off while speeding along the highway, and when Mackenzie pointed it out, he said that the sun was in his eyes and it was hard for him to see.
He made a few statements that didn’t really make sense at all before he started nodding off completely.
At one point, Mackenzie had to grab the wheel to keep him from crashing.
She hit him several times to get him to pay attention — why she didn’t just get him to pull over is beyond us — and finally she turned the dash cameras off.
The microphones stayed on though, and that’s how we heard her ask him if he’d taken Xanax before driving.
He swore on Bentley’s life that he didn’t, but somehow it wasn’t very believable.
And they just continued along to their parking lot wedding.
The scene was so disturbing that MTV aired a warning before showing it, and afterwards they slipped in a little message about substance abuse.
But to many viewers, it simply wasn’t enough.
“Terrible choice not letting production break the barrier while they watched Ryan Edwards drive high on drugs and endanger every1,” one person wrote on Twitter.
Another said “When Ryan Edwards from teen Mom kills a family while MTV knowingly lets him drive intoxicated on drugs while they film it, they won’t care.”
It’s true that the Teen Mom crew wasn’t actively filming Ryan while he was driving — the scene was captured with cameras mounted to the dashboard.
Sometimes the crew reviews the footage later, but sometimes they follow along in another vehicle with a live feed of what’s going on in the cast members’ cars.
It’s unclear what was happening during this particular scene.
But in a statement MTV made to Us Weekly, they’re making it clear they had no idea that Ryan was impaired.
“MTV does not condone driving under the influence,” the statement read.
“Ryan’s erratic behavior was due to actions that he took without anyone’s prior knowledge.”
Which is definitely possible.
But the thing is that Ryan was acting strangely earlier that day as well.
When Mackenzie told him that the wedding was scheduled for that evening, he told her that he needed to go get a haircut — his voice sounded odd, and he didn’t seem too coordinated.
She tried to convince him to wait, but he said he needed to do it, and drove off with a backpack, which some people find suspicious.
He was gone for a while, so long that he made them late for the wedding. A popular theory is that in addition to getting a haircut, he also got high.
At any point that day, wouldn’t it have been smart to stop him? Wouldn’t he have dash cams going during that ride, too, or cameras following him getting ready for his big day?
How is it that, on such a special occasion, he was able to get high enough to nod off in the car without anyone noticing and intervening?
It’s a sad, scary situation, any way you look at it.
