By Phil Corso
Michelle Lamelza makes most of her money working as a restaurant manager at Bayside’s Donovan’s Grill & Tavern, but she might have found an extra $100,000 thousands of miles away in the islands of Fiji.
Lamelza, 35, will be featured Thursday in the premiere of “72 Hours,” a brand-new TNT competition series, showing off her survival skills with nothing but a GPS and one bottle of water for three teammates to share.
She and two others were cast as the green team in the series’ first episode to compete against two other teams of three with contestants coming from all over the globe. They were dropped into the middle of the Yasawa Islands in Fiji and given only 72 hours to locate a briefcase full of cash.
The show, hosted by actor Brandon Johnson, will air at 9 p.m. Thursday, June 6, with a viewing party scheduled at Donovan’s, at 214-16 41st Ave.
And though Lamelza would not get into her team’s ultimate fate, she alluded to an entertaining adventure nonetheless.
“I’m the only chick from New York,” Lamelza said. “And the fact that my team kicks major butt on the show makes it all better.”
Lamelza’s teammates hailed from completely different corners of the country, with 27-year-old medical aesthetician Lindsay, of California, and 31-year-old dance instructor Chris, from North Carolina. Their opponents came from as far as the United Kingdom and Ontario, Canada.
“I thought it’d be a cool thing to represent Bayside,” she said. “Bayside rules.”
To get onto the show, Lamelza said she jokingly submitted a video and application to the producers in June 2012 without any serious expectations of making it. By the following October, she was jumping out of an airplane with the camera rolling for what she called the craziest experience of her life.
But Lamelza’s Bayside roots were not a first in the world of television. Her neighborhood has made it onto the TV screen several times with crews filming on the Bell Boulevard pavement.
Earlier this year, FX television series “The Americans” set up shop along Bell Boulevard and at the Bayside Long Island Rail Road station to film parts of one of its debut episodes. Television crews transformed parts of the busy business district into a flashback to the 1980s Cold War era, filled with KGB spies and old-fashioned cars.
In nearby Douglaston, “The Carrie Diaries” were filmed on the streets behind PS 98 along 41st Avenue as well. The show aired this year as a prequel to “Sex and the City.”
Even back in 1999, an episode of the Philadelphia-based “Boy Meets World” chose to shoot the exterior of Bell Boulevard’s Uncle Jack’s Steakhouse as its prime location to stage a karaoke restaurant scene with its main characters.
Lamelza will be featured only in the premiere of “72 Hours,” which will then shift gears from blue waters and a steaming sun to thick forests and sand dunes for its second episode June 13, which was shot in New Zealand.
Reach reporter Phil Corso by e-mail at pcorso@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4573.
