LI has a starring role in new 'Catfish' episode

"Catfish" went swimming on Long Island for an episode airing Wednesday at 8 p.m. as the MTV reality show that investigates false online-dating identities found a story that ranged from West Babylon to Dix Hills, with a guest appearance by the Long Island Expressway.

For this sixth episode of the eighth season, co-creator and longtime host Nev Schulman and co-host Kamie Crawford were contacted by a 19-year-old woman, Akirra, from Oxon Hill, Maryland. Before she took up with her boyfriend William, she tells them, he had been in an online relationship with a Medford woman he knew as Jamie. She regularly sent him money, but when efforts to meet in person never materialized, William moved on.

Since then, says Akirra, Jamie has bombarded her with harassing and occasionally threatening messages, evading digital blocks by evidently using multiple false accounts. Are Jamie and William still involved? And why was she sending him money? Was William, as Crawford suggests, a "virtual gigolo"?

"This might be one of the crazier 'Catfish' stories we've ever had," Schulman avers.

To try to solve the mystery, the co-hosts fly Akirra and William to New York, where a showdown occurs at Dix Hills Park — which the mysterious Jamie refers to in a text as Hillsdale Park for no apparent reason, though Schulman, driving, gets to the right place.

In addition to that locale, says an MTV spokeswoman, "We shot a bit at a gas station in Old Bethpage and at various houses in Huntington and West Babylon."