Victoria: This time last year, Hayley and I were eagerly awaiting the beginning of the new season of The Bachelorette, which had been filmed under pretty strict Covid rules at a resort cut off from the rest of the world. Plus, news had leaked from the set that they'd had to replace the original Bachelorette, Clare Crawley, with Tayshia Adams, who became only the franchise's second Black lead after Rachel Lindsay in 2017. We were desperate for drama, and Bach was promising to deliver.
A year later, we are basically not watching at all! I suppose it's bad to start an essay about a phenomenon with what went wrong, but the story of The Bachelor is a story of what went wrong.
Let's go back. I never watched The Bachelor or its myriad spin-offs until 2016, when Jojo Fletcher was the lead. Jojo's season was basically classic — Jojo had not been picked by the previous Bachelor, Ben Higgins, and on night one of her season she fell head over heels for former football player Jordan Rodgers, whose brother is the more famous Aaron (they're estranged). While Jordan and Jojo's romance played out, the remaining guys got into ridiculous fights and dick-measuring contests, and we all laughed and cringed at their antics. Jojo and Jordan got engaged and are still together (they were going to get married last year, but Covid).
Jordan and Jojo, the faces of true love
What I didn't know then was that such a happy season is rare. Historically Bachelorettes have had more luck finding husbands than Bachelors do finding wives, but the success rates in general aren't great. And the last few seasons have really fucked things up. Arie Luyendyk chose Becca Kufrin, only to un-choose her, on camera. It is excruciating. You must watch it.
Then Becca had her season, and the guy she chose was an enormous racist, who she eventually broke up with but like, not until years later? We don't have time to unpack it all. When the one girl Colton Underwood wanted to pick left, he jumped a fence and ran away in the middle of Spain. Then he kinda strong-armed her into dating him anyway, she got a restraining order and accused him of stalking her, and he came out of the closet as if that made all his behavior OK. Hannah Brown had to immediately dump her fiancé when fans figured out he fully had a girlfriend the entire time he was on the show. Peter "Pilot Pete" Weber was an absolute snooze and could not convince anyone to get fake engaged to him. Then as mentioned earlier, during the quarantine Bachelorette season, Clare left her season early because she refused to date anyone but Dale Moss, which broke the show. Then they had their first Black Bachelor, Matt James, who was extremely uncomfortable in front of all the cameras. The person he chose also has a documented history of racism, but they are still together.
The show is broken.
Hayley: Wow, reading through this really brought so many memories flooding back to the front of my mind. I also had a very late entry point into The Bachelor in 2018 when my dear friend Brita asked my roommate and I if we wanted to watch Arie's season with her. We did, and inevitably got sucked in during one of the most insane seasons of that show, because of the aforementioned excruciating on-camera breakup. Since then, I was hooked. Becca's redemption arc setup for The Bachelorette fell flat once we all knew that her front-runner (and eventual fiancé!) Garrett Yrigoyen was liking extremely racist, transphobic, and anti-fat memes on Instagram.
I have never watched The Bachelor(ette) in a world where social media didn't exist, or where spoilers were a-plenty on pretty mainstream media websites and podcasts. The fact that Clare had left her season and was supposedly being replaced with Tayshia, was, in fact, a "spoiler". This show, which I think would be hard to film anyway, has become almost impossible to film with social media. It is bizarre, and sucks a lot, to be watching week 6 of a show where the lead is on a one-on-one date with someone that they really like, when the entire internet knows that he is a blatent racist, or has a girlfriend at home, or what have you.
With Matt James' season, I stopped watching completely after a few weeks. It was like all of the bad shit from Becca's season, times ten. This show has a well-documented problem with racism, and completely fumbled the bag YET AGAIN. The drama of the show no longer carried me through my week. It just made me sad. I don't think that The Bachelor is beyond saving, but I do think that they need to incorporate social media into the show's format if they have any hope of resurrecting it.
These two....oh boy
Victoria: I think it's important to talk about why we do like watching the Bach-verse, at its best. First off, it can be funny. Not usually when people are trying to be funny, but the humor is there. And then, you're watching it and making fun and goofing around, when suddenly some real fucking ROMANCE hits you in the face!! Tayshia and Zac Clark's proposal?? I tear up thinking about it!
Of course, it can also be really depressing to watch a bunch of thin, white 26 year olds cry because they think this boring dude is their last chance at love! The show also tries to walk this weird path between over-the-top sexuality and purity culture — they might make the Bachelorette do sexy partners yoga, but then if she had sex with two of the guys it's a scandal. And of course the whole thing is wrapped up in this hyper-heterosexual performance. There are no (out) queer leads on The Bachelor. Being bisexual is a secret you confess and hope the lead is OK with. It's depressing!
I'm also thinking about the history of reality dating as I write this. When the Bachelor premiered in 2002, there was a crowded market. I used to love sneakily watching episodes of Blind Date when my parents were asleep. Both regular TV and cable were soon full of dating shows — the icons, like Flavor of Love with Flavor Flav, Rock of Love with Bret Michaels, I Love New York, and A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, and duds like Joe Millionaire, Beauty and the Geek, and the infamous I Wanna Marry Harry. Then there were the MTV ones, also iconic to me — Room Raiders and Parental Control and Next, where if a date didn't like you they could immediately replace you with a new date. Wow, I watched a lot of these!! Surely it didn't mess with my brain!!!
Overtime these shows went out of style and we were basically left with The Bachelor(ette), which is basically an old dinosaur that's desperate to stay relevant but clueless as to how they can actually do that. And now there are more dating shows in town, and Bach has competition!
Bring back Next!
Hayley: Room Raiders, Parental Control, and Next were some of my absolute favorite shows on MTV...ever?? Also honorable mentions to non-dating reality shows like True Life and Made. I don't really think MTV gets the credit it deserves for its early-00s reality programming. The best things about these shows are also what I love the most about the Bachelor: The hijinks! The silliness! The drama! And of course, nothing beats watching these shows with your friends and goofing on them in real time. Many sleepovers were spent watching blocks of all of these shows back-to-back during the midnight-2am time slot. Fun fact: in high school for our final project for AP American History, we recorded our own version of Next, where each date was from a different decade in American history. Sadly this video has been lost to the sands of time.
Sometimes I feel like The Bachelor should lean into its inherent silliness more. The show still takes itself very seriously, and the most staged/romantic aspects usually fall really flat and stuffy. Tayshia and Zac's proposal, of course, is a shining beacon of a time when you are actually rooting for the final couple and believe that they genuinely have feelings for each other. It's honestly been a blessing to follow Tayshia on Instagram and see how happy she is with Zac. But —that's the exception, not the rule!
Last year Netflix debuted its biggest dating reality show, Love is Blind, where all of the contestants "met" via these pods where they could have conversations, but couldn't see each other. It is as ridiculous as it sounds! And yet! It was super entertaining and fun, and also somehow turned out a successful couple in Lauren and Cameron. Sometimes it just clicks, which is as true on any of these bananas dating shows as it is in real life. Maybe that's what we should be taking away from all of this at the end of the day, that the reality in these reality dating shows is as messy as actual reality: There's racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-fat bias, Christianity, vague polyamory, anxiety, stress, tears, laughter, champagne splashing in your face, and sometimes, romance. IDK, sounds like life to me!!!
Victoria: I think we are in a new wave of reality dating TV — there's Love Is Blind, like you said, plus other Netflix attempts like Too Hot Too Handle (where horny contestants can't have sex) and that one where people had to wear masks. HBO Max has FBoy Island (I did not enjoy it) and a holiday dating show called 12 Dates of Christmas. And MTV has the incredible Are You The One, and if you're reading this you should hurry to MTV dot com and watch season eight, where everyone is sexually fluid. Of course there's Love Island, which I personally cannot commit to, but it is very loved. And Peacock is debuting a Jane Austen-themed dating show that I did submit for (I did not hear back).
What these shows all together have going for them is that there's more than one couple! Unlike The Bachelor, where one crappy guy can ruin the whole thing, there's lots of people to grab your attention on these shows. And I think it's probably easier to find love on a show where there's a whole big group of people and you're basically just hanging out or playing goofy games all the time, instead of going on shitty Bachelor dates. I think this is probably why shows that aren't even dating shows — Survivor, Big Brother, The Circle, and The Challenge, for example — have actually amazing track records of creating new couples, because they basically just let people vibe and see if they connect.
I will say that as a fat person it sucks that there has never been a fat person on a dating show. I joked before, but I think it has fucked with my head — here are the people who are determined by the TV gods to be worthy of a shot at love, and they're all thin!
Maybe the best thing reality dating has given us are novels that use dating shows as a plot device. There's the wonderful One To Watch, which imagines a Bachelorette lead who is fat. There's The Charm Offensive, which comes out September 7, and is about a Bachelor lead who falls for his (also a man) producer. And I just picked up If The Shoe Fits, which puts a Cinderella-inspired twist on the genre. It's kind of like the joy of reading a Regency romance, in a way — there's all these rules and constrictions and it's about people finding love amidst that!
Before we go, if you are a Bachelor fan (or even a dabbler) and you haven't watched season one of Unreal, you need to. It changes forever the way you watch that (or any reality) show.
What Hayley Thinks You Should Try
- This Aldi Buffalo Cauliflower Dip is SO GOOD, you simply have to try it. I went back to get more but of course Aldi was out.
- I bought this dumb Succession mug on Etsy and it brings me eternal joy.
- The Olive & June Fall Collection is here, and this is your friendly reminder to always use my link or Victoria's link when you buy/restock O&J. We get comission, you get cool nails, everyone wins!
What Victoria Recommends Right Now
- I rented The Green Knight last week and loved it. I also loved this essay about it.
- I very much enjoyed the newest Jasmine Guillory romance, While We Were Dating.
- Love this playlist of women covering songs made famous by men.
Follow Gold-Plated Girls on Twitter and Instagram! Follow Hayley on Twitter and Instagram, and Victoria on Twitter and Instagram.