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Ecw Press - Suzannah Showler

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109 pages

English

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When it debuted in 2002, The Bachelor raised the stakes of first-wave reality television, offering the ultimate prize: true love. Since then, thrice yearly, dozens of camera-ready young-and-eligibles have vied for affection (and roses) in front of a devoted audience of millions. In this funny, insightful examination of the world's favourite romance-factory, Suzannah Showler explores the contradictions that are key to the franchise's genius, longevity, and power and parses what this means for both modern love and modern America.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

Popular culture

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	05 avril 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773051673
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

most dramatic ever.
the bachelor
suzannah showler

the pop classics series
#1 It Doesn’t Suck. Showgirls
#2 Raise Some Shell. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
#3 Wrapped in Plastic. Twin Peaks
#4 Elvis Is King. Costello’s My Aim Is True
#5 National Treasure. Nicolas Cage
#6 In My Humble Opinion. My So-Called Life
#7 Gentlemen of the Shade. My Own Private Idaho
#8 Ain’t No Place for a Hero. Borderlands
#9 Most Dramatic Ever. The Bachelor

Contents
Introduction Most Dramatic Ever
One-on-One Time Romance
Please Use This Key Sex
Gotta Vill Villains
It’s Like a Real-Life Thing Production
Bachelor Nation Viewers
Almost Paradise Spinoffs
Not Going to Say the Words Race
Conclusion After the Final Rose
Selected Sources
Acknowledgments With That Being Said
About the Author
Copyright

Introduction: Most Dramatic Ever
It’s a swimming pool at the edge of the world. The far lip of the pool juts over a vast coastal panorama as if the steep drop-off to the ocean happens here, maybe right under our feet. Everything is water and light and water: the up-close, unreal blue of the pool picked up in the ocean, which takes the color and runs with it, bolting towards the horizon at the speed of a shimmer, colliding with the preposterous, unbroken blue of the sky. It’s impossible to say which part — man-made or natural — is the imitation. It all seems like one thing.
This is the first shot of the first episode of The Bachelor . It’s brief, just a few moments, but the beauty it shows is willful, boggling, engineered for optical illusion. Even if you’ve never been to California, you know this is California. The way every element — pool, ocean, sky — flattens with an eager camera-readiness makes you think maybe people build mansions and pools in places like this not to look at the view, but to be inside it. And the mistake of thinking the ground drops out from under us — maybe that’s the idea. Maybe it’s kind of true. Like there are places where the whole point of beauty, of nature, is to condition us to get something wrong.
It’s just a few seconds. The camera swings left, and standing on the pool deck there’s a man in a summer suit that looks like millennium-era Gap khaki taking a crack at formalwear. “Hi,” he says, “I’m Chris Harrison. And no, I’m not the Bachelor.”
*
When The Bachelor debuted in 2002, it was hardly a latecomer to the reality TV party, but it also wasn’t leading the vanguard. In summer 2000, when Survivor — with its safe, silly contrivance overlaid with the dark exposure of bare life — turned out to be an explosive ratings-gobbler, it appeared that something about the palate of 21st-century TV viewers had either exposed itself or been whetted. In the glut of turn-of-the-millennium reality TV that followed, The Bachelor was solidly in the middle: after Big Brother and Fear Factor , before America’s Next Top Model and The Simple Life , in just about the same breath as American Idol .
By virtue of its subject (hetero dating), The Bachelor also has ancestral roots reaching back to the 1960s and ’70s with The Dating Game : that game show classic where bachelors numbered one through three (sometimes gender-reversed) compete with ice-breaking trivia for a chance to take a prize woman out on the studio’s dime. The Dating Game ran for a decade in the mid-’60s and then, like the matchmaking undead, was revived three times between the late ’70s and late ’90s. Without the seriality of The Bachelor , Dating was pure game show, suffering no fuss over “reasons,” right or wrong, to sign up as a contestant. A common gig for struggling actors, Dating Game archives are a real treasure trove of before-they-were-famous footage.
There are also Bachelor relations among its own reality cohort, kissing cousins (maybe more like drunk makeout cousins?) like Blind Date and Temptation Island . Blind Date , which ran from 1999 into the mid-aughts, set couples up on multi-part, multi-drink dates then glossed the footage — often pretty dull on its face — with cheeky cartoon thought bubbles. Temptation Island was a kind of false rumspringa, bringing four committed couples to a resort, splitting them up, and surrounding each with a cast of (tempting, hence the name) professional bods of the opposite sex. Temptation was sort of The Bachelor ’s inverse — an experiment in romance-busting rather than building — but tapped the same fears and longings. In its own way, it held up monogamy as an aspirational, self-improving end.
Finally, the closest comp by virtue of its shared paternity is Bachelor executive producer Mike Fleiss’s first televised matrimonial extravaganza, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? — Homo habilis to The Bachelor ’s erectus . A single two-hour special aired in 2000, Millionaire was a classic, 50-state American beauty pageant with a shadowy sugar daddy (literally: he was only visible in silhouette) serving as both judge and winner’s crown (no “scholarship program” here). Twenty-two million people tuned in to watch Miss-turned-Mrs. Millionaire claim her prize of on-the-spot wedlock to the moneybags. Just as soon as the couple had honeymooned-slash-met, it was revealed that FOX had done poor vetting on their “millionaire next door” (as Fleiss had called him), who had a restraining order from an ex-fiancée on the grounds of domestic violence. He’d also fudged his professional creds, his name, and quite possibly the barely plural millions for which he’d been cast. Whoopsie-daisy! Better background checks next time.
Despite this unalloyed failure, Fleiss remained convinced that America was thirsty for reality TV–made marriage. (After all, 22 million had tuned in to watch his wayward liability pageant in the first place.) After striking out at a couple of other networks, Fleiss sold ABC on another show about dozens of women pursuing a single man’s hand. This time the pitch was less beauty pageant and more true love on crack: the usual beats, from meet-cute to matrimony, cranked up by the presence of rivals and the fantasy-making efforts of TV production. A competitive fairy tale. The Bachelor was signed for six one-hour episodes and given an eight-week, shoestring shoot in which to make Mike Fleiss’s dreams come true. It was, for Fleiss, a second chance at (producing) love.
Unscripted dating shows that came before The Bachelor generated the standard reality TV goodies: embarrassing moments, interpersonal drama, the ups and downs of competition. But they had a common failing: prodding at schadenfreude under the auspices of dating made dating look bad. Though these shows were allegedly about romance, none was actually romantic .
So, yeah, uh, The Bachelor doesn’t really have that problem. A many-candle-lined, rose-petal-strewn, sunset-lit journey to find The One, the Bachelor ’s romance is pitched to take your breath away, suck oxygen, smother. The show has never been coy about its ambitions. In the very first episode, Chris Harrison tells us: “This is not an ordinary relationship show — the stakes are considerably higher here. This is about something real. Something permanent. You know, the whole till death do you part thing?”
It may have been joining the spate of crass human spectacles hurled up in TV to ring in the 21st century, but The Bachelor parades shamelessly into lofty rhetoric past centuries have left to their poets. From the beginning, the show asserted its right not to choose between high and low, professing to expose the drama of real people acting out of loneliness and fear, then pull it together for the payoff of happily ever after. And with this blunt promise, The Bachelor reassured viewers that it was okay for us to want it both ways.
At its beating, rose-red heart, The Bachelor is basically just two things: it’s a game show, and it’s a love story — more particularly, a marriage plot. And before you think about it too hard, the pairing sounds so natural that it’s hard to believe someone even had to think it up. Like, wait, was that not already a thing? After all, the game show and the marriage plot are, arguably, the defining innovations of middle-class entertainment of the 20th and 18th-into-19th centuries, respectively. Both genres are so endlessly popular and endlessly replicable that the twain shall meet seems more like a command than a proposition. The Bachelor as inevitability.
But if public competition meets love-’n’-marriage Romance sounds like a harmonious populist twinning, the moment you think it through it’s obvious the genres ought to be mutually exclusive. Though both game shows and love stories offer a fantasy of delivery from regular life, they propose that different forces compel the ascent. The game show publicizes the ordinary individual as a competitor who channels luck and skill to author their own fate. The marriage plot reveals that even the ordinary individual may be chosen and moved by the benevolent authority of a fate beyond their control. So on the one hand, The Bachelor is a competition, and it’s anyone’s game. On the other hand, it also purports to be an expression of romantic destiny: a series of turns plotted to reach a preordained end.
That illogic isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. In fact, it’s the very crux of The Bachelor ’s tenacious, addictive endurance. Because in its refusal to choose between a game show’s effort and a love story’s kismet, I argue that The Bachelor is the ultimate specimen of American entertainment, mimicking a similar refusal to choose between foundational myths at the heart of the nation’s identity and self-image. The show presents as an open playing field, freely available for any individual to enter, meet, and conquer. Then when someone actually wins, their victory is recast as the inexorable allotment of fortune. Differently put: for weeks the sho