I Shouldn’t Be Watching This takes a writer who would otherwise have no interest in watching a show and throws them right into it. The aim is to assess how a show works for its target demographic and whether it has merit outside of it.
Holy s*** you guys. After about a week of spending all my free time watching nothing but this season of The Bachelor, I’m pretty sure an MRI of my brain would only depict a monkey trying to eat a rose. This show and all its assorted spawn (Bachelorette, Bachelor Pad etc.) is a mind-numbing exercise in emotional manipulation and bulls*** claims. There’s some joy to be found in watching people fall in love, but how can one consider the constant contrivance of a show like The Bachelor to be capable of cultivating real love? Do people really believe this garbage? I’m not bagging on this show only because it’s so easy–I’m genuinely interested in why it’s so popular because, from my point of view, there are only a couple of possible ways to enjoy a show like this.
At first, the show elicits the usual jaded (albeit correct) reactions: “None of this is real,” “These people are all idiots,” and, “If these women have all ostensibly watched the show before, why do they still scream ‘O MY GOD’ every time they see a date card?” Look, I get that it’s a TV show and you shouldn’t take it so seriously. However, when watching the incredibly milquetoast Sean explain how “every one of these girls is so special” in every episode, it’s hard not to get mad at the robotic nature of the whole thing. Isn’t love (among other things) supposed to be about finding someone who you not only are attracted to, but also one who you feel helps to persevere through the problems one faces every day? Or is love about “getting a rose,” or “making sure I don’t go home tonight,” or about bungee jumping off a bridge just so someone can say “we took the plunge (WINK WINK)?” Call me a cynic, but I see no possibility of genuinely enjoying this show, especially not while it’s so easy to see the producers and the editors pulling all the heart strings.
These people who have volunteered themselves to fall in love on television are seriously at the mercy of editing and production. Watch an episode, no, watch five minutes of an episode, and if there isn’t a loud music cue telling you how to feel about this person, or a plethora of reaction shots from other women clearly spliced from different parts of the conversation, or a slew of ridiculous B-roll shots of the contestants looking longingly out into the distance, then I will eat my computer monitor. There really doesn’t seem to be much insincerity among the people on the show (aside from the inherent insincerity of falling in love in front of a camera crew). The machinations of the production crew are always looming in some way. It gets to the point where in a live special episode, the editors cut back from commercial before the show actually starts back up, I guess to give us a “real” look at these people. It all still feels so forced and manipulated.
Once I reached day three of marathoning The Bachelor I found myself experiencing some kind of Stockholm Syndrome. I started viewing it less as a TV show and more like a recorded social experiment. The contestants become rats being led through a maze, but instead of cheese they find spray tans and unfulfilled promises. The thing is, for the most part, the people on this show are sincere. How could they not be? They’re all constantly dressed to the nines, sipping champagne and taking helicopter rides to dates that are always simultaneously extravagant to them and boring to the viewer. Everything is tailored for them to “fall in love.” The show even breaks its own rule, surprisingly often, just to push a specific plot point.
Essentially, The Bachelor becomes like a televised version of the Stanford Prison Experiment: everybody easily falls into their assigned roles. There’s the central pack of girlfriends, the manipulative outcast, and the contestant only defined by a sob story (this season being a woman born with one arm, which, you can guess, is handled with all the care of a 5th grader). Even the Bachelor himself seems stuffed into a box of unceasing niceties, never allowed to have a human moment. All of these contrivances are obviously scripted, and it can’t be an easy task for these writers of a fictional reality show to contrive reasons for these characters to fall in love, but it’s still intriguing, and sometimes disturbing, to see it happen to real people.
Taken on its own merit as a reality show, The Bachelor is tripe that panders to an outmoded view of relationships in order to sell the most toothpaste during commercial breaks. It’s also a strangely interesting case study of the minds of the people who actually apply to be on these shows, if only by virtue of the heavy-handed production, and the extended period this show has spent on air. If you’re a Bachelor lover, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the show’s merits, because at this point, I barely see anything of worth.
