I came terrifyingly close to making a huge mistake last week. No one would have been hurt or anything, but my quality of life would definitely have been affected, and I want to discuss it a little this week because I suspect that most of you are making this mistake on a regular basis.
Monday night came and went, and then Tuesday, then Wednesday. It wasn’t until Thursday that I found myself in front of my TV, scanning my DVR inventory, and saw the season premiere of THE BACHELOR waiting patiently. And I don’t know what got into me, but I very nearly didn’t watch it.
Although it has brought me great amusement in the past, the side of my brain that writes, and performs, and took more Shakespeare courses than were required in college said “Come on dude, can’t we do better than that bottom-feeding tripe?” And for a moment, I almost listened to that stupid, stupid voice.
But the other side of my brain, the one that has no shame or compunction about things like this, the one that dips graham crackers into Nutella and finishes with a spritz of whipped cream straight to the trap said “It’s not like there’s anything else on.”
So I did it: I watched the season premiere of THE BACHELOR, and it was the smartest dumb thing I did all week.
I know what you’re gonna say: THE BACHELOR is stupid, and fake, and exploitive. You’re not completely wrong. The people on this show are stupid for sure. But the ways in which the show is fake and exploitive — frequently approaches genius. It is a completely fascinating sociological experiment that also happens to be hilarious.
The premiere illustrated this perfectly. The best part of every BACHELOR/ETTE premiere is when one of the hopefuls drinks too much on the first night, starts embarrassingly slurring, and then more than likely jumps into the pool. Anyone who’s ever watched the show knows this is going to happen, particularly the contestants, who can frequently be heard professing that they grew up watching the show, that they’ve seen every season, etc.
This, by the way, is the reason there is absolutely no arguing these people are being exploited, because there is no way they don’t know precisely what they’re in for. They all know exactly what’s going to happen. They go in with their eyes open, and when confused about something they frequently refer to precedent like they’re in court: “Remember in Jake’s season when blah-de-blah?” But they still do all the exact same stupid shit as so many girls before them.
Anyway, it appears that this year the producers said to each other, “I love it when someone gets too drunk. That is never not funny. How can we make that happen more?” The solution they came to was to stretch the first night into the next morning: in past seasons, five limousines bring five women at a time to the Bachelor Mansion, in a steady procession, until there are 25 women and the game proper begins. This year the limos stopped coming after only 15 women had arrived, and the bachelor, a corn-farming bit of Iowa beefcake named Chris, was sent into the house to begin socializing, the usual cue that all the women were there. The women spent the time they could have spent trying to get to know Chris instead asking each other why there weren’t more women. “There are always 25 women,” they all told each other. “What does this mean?”
As soon as the show deviated from its old format, the women were completely flummoxed, but excited by the idea that they had less competition than they’d anticipated. They spent more time discussing that amongst themselves than putting the moves on their bachelor. But then after a couple of hours, the limos started coming again and 15 more women arrived, bringing the total to 30. (“But there’s always 25!” one of the women who arrived first whined. “This isn’t how it goes!”)
It worked perfectly, because no fewer than three women used the extra time to get slobberingly, impossibly drunk, horrifying their (single) parents and doubling me over with laughter, before trying to put the clumsy drunken moves on poor Chris. I hate being around drunk women in real life but I love to watch them on TV. Maybe I should discuss that with my therapist.
Anyway, one of these women really stood out: a blonde hairdresser from Brooklyn who resembles Courtney Thorne-Smith from MELROSE PLACE. At least she resembled Courtney Thorne-Smith before she got drunk; after she got drunk she resembled an extra from 12 MONKEYS. You could see the crazy coming off her like heat coming off a desert road.
By the end of the premiere, some of the women waiting for Bachelor Chris to give them their roses and thus keep them in the game are so drunk that they are swaying; one of them actually has to put her hand on another’s shoulder to steady herself. The ones that stayed sober look confident because everyone knows that people who get drunk on the first night never make the first cut, no matter how pretty they are before they get shitfaced.
Except this time, Farmer Chris shocks everyone by choosing Courtney Thorne-Smith AND the girl who almost fell down during the rose ceremony AND another one who got visibly hammered but managed to keep it together (relatively speaking). Once again, everyone is confounded: “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go,” everyone is saying to each other. Up is down, black is white, drunk girls are getting roses, IT’S TOTAL ANARCHY.
Why did Farmer Chris pick the drunk girls? I have no idea. Is it likely that the producers chose those girls for him, to make better TV? Sure is. But that never seems to occur to the contestants, who insist on believing that they’re part of some kind of romantic meritocracy; they often talk about who does or doesn’t “deserve” to be there trying to get the farmer to notice them.
You might watch the premiere and think, like I did, that the whole thing was over the first night anyway, because Chris enthusiastically made out with a very pretty young lady named Britt, who despite a very Miss USA vibe and some unfortunate choices in lipstick color is one of the prettiest I’ve seen on this show and certainly the prettiest this season; she does not appear to be too emotionally damaged or stupid, and is thus the runaway favorite. It’s clear that Britt thinks so too. But they won’t end up together for exactly that reason, because no matter how much he likes her now, he still has to go through the motions of dating and making out with all these other women and there’s no way a woman like Britt, who doesn’t look like she’s heard the word “No” from a male human since she was eleven years old, can stand idly by and watch that without going to pieces. (Judging by the “This Season On THE BACHELOR” promo that ran at the end of the premiere, Britt is going to do a whole lot of crying in the coming episodes, as will at least six of the other women.)
This show might have begun as a straighforwardly cheesy massaged-reality dating show. I wouldn’t know, I only started watching it a few years ago. In any case, it’s interesting now because it’s subverting not only the audience’s expectations of what’s going to happen, but the contestants’. This might be cruel or exploitive, if it weren’t happening to the kind of people who go on THE BACHELOR.