I love “The Bachelor.” My friends and I have Monday night watch parties and live-tweet every episode, and we even participated in a fantasy league this past season—it is SO fun to predict who will receive a rose and who will be sent home ugly crying in the back of a limo. The show is dramatic and ridiculous and rarely realistic or gratifying, and for some reason I revel in every moment of it.
Despite this, I know good and well that “The Bachelor” is often one of the first things that comes to mind with the use of the phrase “trash TV.” This is fair—besides its entertainment value and ability to bring people from around the world together (just search #TheBachelor on Twitter and you’ll see what I mean), the show doesn’t serve much of a purpose.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the show, each season follows a bachelor as he is introduced to a group of around 30 bachelorettes, which he eventually narrows down to a single woman to whom he will propose. The bachelor will select individual women to take on extravagant dates each week and venture out with multiple women on the infamous “group dates.” Typically, each episode ends with a “rose ceremony,” during which the bachelor will present a rose to the women he wishes to stay in the competition and say his goodbyes to those he is sending home. Throughout this process, the women all live in a mansion together, which makes for plenty of drama, tears and incredibly high ratings for the network.
I felt ridiculous even typing all of that. The idea of dating multiple people at once and finding your spouse through process of elimination, all while cameras are rolling and millions of people are watching, is so far from how relationships are supposed to work that I can’t even fully explain why I enjoy watching it. But what struck me as I watched this past season was not the twisted premise of the show itself, but the light in which the show presented its contestants.
On this season’s premiere, it was revealed that one of the contestants, a woman named Liz, had had a relationship with the bachelor, Nick Viall, between his previous appearance on “The Bachelorette” and his turn as the bachelor. (That’s right—Viall competed not once, not twice, but THREE times on spinoffs of the “Bachelor” franchise.) Liz’s previous relationship with Viall was widely discussed during her stint on the show, and was eventually the reason that Viall sent her home.
This depiction of Liz didn’t bother me until the “women tell all” episode, which is essentially a giant shouting match toward the end of the season where all of the eliminated bachelorettes are invited back to air their grievances against the bachelor and each other. As the show’s host was grilling Liz on her relationship with Viall, one of the other women pointed out that most of America knew Liz as the woman who had a relationship with Viall, but that she knew Liz as a kind, caring friend and strong woman.
It was at this point I realized that not only does “The Bachelor” promote a distorted view of love and marriage, but also forces its viewers to perceive its contestants in a certain way. Some of the women who look for love on “The Bachelor” may actually be as psychotic as they seem, but how much of their persona is manufactured by camera angles and the cuts that producers made?
This viewpoint doesn’t do much to redeem “The Bachelor”; it’s still a creepy concept, but I’m still going to watch it anyway. However, it’s important to know when watching “The Bachelor” and shows like it that they promote a distorted reality and should be treated as such.
– By Katie Kemp, news editor
