The Bachelor is sleepwalking. What once was an institution of reality TV has, little by little, dwindled to a heartless paint-by-numbers.
Zach Shallcross’ currently airing season has been marketed as a back-to-basics return for the series, but it’s hardly a victory lap for a franchise that has never meaningfully evolved away from the tradition in the first place. Instead, the so-called “return” is a desperate misunderstanding of what disillusioned fans yearn for from the show.
It’s like if Friday the 13th announced a return to its roots before the film franchise had even traversed space and Manhattan.
The Bachelor has had a rocky few years, but much of that fallout has come off screen, with Peter Weber’s post-season game of romantic hot potato and Katie Thurston’s “12 Days of Messy” reveal that she was dating one of her contestants just a few weeks after she split from her season’s winner.
The show has also been consumed by a plethora of racism scandals, from Garrett Yrigoyen’s alt-right social media scandal to Rachael Kirkconnell’s Confederacy party scandal and the fallout of Chris Harrison defending her.
If going “back-to-basics” for The Bachelor means igniting another racism scandal, then this season is right on cue, given frontrunner Greer Blitzer’s own dalliance with defending blackface. But if returning “back-to-basics” means a show that’s more entertaining on screen than on social media, they’ve miserably failed.
It wasn’t cardboard cutout leads or a cast made up of women who share the same hairstylist that made the franchise iconic, but the bumbling authenticity of a series that seemed somewhat in on the joke. Nothing this season has come close to Tierra from Season 17 melting down because she can’t control her eyebrow.
The modern franchise takes itself painfully seriously, and the Groundhog Day-like repetitiveness has infected every member of the cast. From making a cutesy face as their names are read on the date card to “stealing him for a sec,” each woman is a product of years of the show’s rehearsed history.
New Season, Old Patterns
During every one-on-one date, the women dig into their inner trauma as Zach shares little to nothing of his own life, a routine we’ve come to expect over the years. But these forced emotional displays have long seemed more like a formality rather than a true moment. It’s a symptom of a greater issue, when every date has the energy of a throwaway filler scene.
Take Zach’s first date of the season with Christina Mandrell, who uses her full name to show us she’s connected to some country singer (because the franchise seems obsessed with pandering to conservative America).
Each word Christina Mandrell and Zach speaks is carefully crafted and devoid of feeling. The Bachelor seems genuinely horrified by spontaneity, so it has to create an emotional simulation we’ve seen a million times before. After a playful montage of a day-date, Christina gets serious and tells Zach that she has a kid. He gives her a rose even though he’s not sure if he can handle that, and we move on.
That’s followed up by Zach’s sanitized rendezvous with Kaity. In theory, a sleepover date at a museum is magical, romantic, and aspirational. But between the frumpy pajamas the two don and Zach telling her in a monotone, “I think it was night one? I think we felt a little bit of a spark,” the date is entirely devoid of passion.
Somehow, even Monday night’s reveal that Zach has COVID boiled down to the show’s same few miserable beats. While Kaity and Zach sit on opposite sides of his hotel room door as he quarantines, their conversation stays well within the defined parameters the show allows.
As Zach goes down the list of Bachelor affirmations, hitting the “I do see something with you” and “I can’t wait to see what happens” bullet points, it just hammers the nail home on how humorless and devoid of personality the show’s become.
When Real Housewives of Miami friend-of Marysol Patton thought she might have COVID on last week’s episode, we had her and Alexia accusing the other women of witchcraft. But all we get on The Bachelor is a sleepy video-chat cocktail party.
The one moment of substance was Zach snapping at Greer over video chat after she talked about how frustrating it was when she got COVID at the end of the sales quarter. But Zach’s disgusted reaction that he’s trying to find a wife, not working a job is begging for a wink to the audience, some kind of acknowledgment of the absurdity of it all. And we don’t get it.
It’s not that the cast is incapable of authenticity or levity. The “blooper” scenes that close out episodes are often the show’s highlight, providing the one real glimpse into anyone’s personality. The Bachelor would be a better show if it stopped being so stuffy and puritanical and instead weaved the women talking about farting into the main episode.
There's a Better Way!
In episodes that aired in the same week, both The Bachelor and the RHOM cast stayed at Baha Mar in the Bahamas, RHOM showing a lavish trip full of hilarity and intense drama while The Bachelor reduced the setting to a drab backdrop for a lackluster episode. In 43 minutes, RHOM took us on a tour de force of Adriana de Moura’s emotional meltdown and fake injury, layered with Alexia Nepola and Larsa Pippen’s ever-fascinating delusions.
While Bravo’s heavy-hitters have embraced nuance, The Bachelor still wants to purport an image of villains and heroes, shown through the lens of the “right reasons” to find love on TV.
The show tackles the reality of Instagram fame in the fourth episode, but horribly mismanages what should be a compelling storyline. When Kylee exposes that Anastasia allegedly said they’ll each gain 50,000 Instagram followers from the show, the entire cast guffaws in pearl-clutching disdain.
As Gabi argues that “this isn’t the time or the place to talk about how many followers you’re gonna have when you leave the show,” all I could think is—well, why not? It’s more authentic to acknowledge the social media reality than to claim you’re on this show purely to find love. For the show to call out Anastasia as though she was truly alone in that view is obtuse.
Rather than dig into the hypocrisy, the entire cast turns on Anastasia and she’s swiftly sent home, topped off by a humorless edit unwilling to catch the hypocrisy. Poor girl is screwed by a production team that’s even dimmer than its cast.
The most tedious moment of the season has to be infamous former contestant Tahzjuan’s pitiful return. Showing up alongside some classic villains for a group date exercise, she then decides to stick around and see if she and Zach have a spark.
Trotting out a cast member from an earlier season is a trope the franchise has used to varying degrees of success for more than 10 years, but it has never felt as hollow as Tahzjuan’s failed attempt.
Seemingly fresh off a nap, Tahzjuan tells the ladies she’s ready to see where things go—and even she doesn’t buy it. Her delivery is so flat and lifeless that it almost circles back to funny. There’s a palpable energy that producers likely dangled a spot on the next season of Bachelor in Paradise over Tahzjuan’s head in exchange for five minutes of screentime of her pretending she wants Zach.
And in a flash, she’s gone. It’s clear what that scene intended to serve. It tells us Zach is serious about finding love and doesn’t want to play games. He won’t fall for the antics of past leads, because we’ve gone “back-to-basics,” apparently. But the desperate attempt to make him the next Sean Lowe is both misguided and poorly executed.
Sean’s season wasn’t successful because he refused to succumb to games. It worked because of the saga of Tierra and her aforementioned eyebrow and the unexpected slowburn of Sean and Catherine’s love story. It’s been a decade since that highpoint, and it’s hard to feel any hope for the fallen franchise. I’ve watched this show since I was 10. I know the ins and outs of Bachelor Nation better than I know myself, but watching its hollow modern entity is more frustrating than rewarding.
What was once water-cooler TV is now hardly suitable as background fodder. In the words of Nene Leakes—someone who actually knows how to make good reality TV— “Nothing was there.”
Maybe one day I’ll beg for a back-to-basics season. But right now, I’m begging for some entertainment.
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