In the summer of 1999, the young television producer Mike Fleiss had already achieved some early success making tacky compilation reality shows such as “Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape” and “World’s Scariest Police Shootouts,” when he had an idea for a game show, in which a wealthy man would select a winner from a group of fifty wedding-gown-clad women, propose, and then marry her. After some searching, Fleiss found his star, Rick Rockwell, a comedian and real-estate investor, and, in February, 2000, a two-hour TV special called “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire” aired on Fox. On a studio stage bathed in harsh lighting, Rockwell chose an emergency-room nurse, Darva Conger, to be his bride, and twenty-three million people viewed the pageant-like proceedings.
Recently, I rewatched the moment in which Rockwell—lantern-jawed, his smile locked in a manic rictus—swoops in to kiss Conger, a slim, yellow-tressed woman whose tense grin echoes his. The two are, obviously, complete strangers—and, unsurprisingly, their union buckled almost immediately under the weight of its own extreme premise. Rockwell, it emerged, was barely a millionaire; he had also had a restraining order filed against him by a former girlfriend. Conger later revealed that the marriage was not consummated on the new couple’s all-expenses-paid Barbados honeymoon. The union was annulled seven weeks after it was forged. But Fleiss wasn’t done yet. As Amy Kaufman recounts in her new book, “Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure,” the producer came to understand that he could tease out and extend the romance, nurturing it carefully into full blossom. And so “The Bachelor” was born.
In 2002, during a difficult first year of grad school, as a foreign student in Baltimore, I watched the second season of the show, on ABC, which starred the dull but calming Bachelor Aaron Buerge, a Midwestern banker whose very large head had, I used to marvel, the quality of a solid cube of beef. Now, this is America, I told myself: a country brimming with healthy, pleasingly robust bodies, a land of meat and milk and corn. It was during this season that I first encountered the hallmarks of the show, in which banally attractive and almost always white protagonists are provided with a string of one-on-one and group dates to “get to know” the contestants, who live together in a “luxury mansion,” and who are progressively winnowed down in formal “rose ceremonies.”
Since then, in the course of more than forty seasons, the “Bachelor” franchise—which came to include the spinoffs “The Bachelorette,” “Bachelor Pad,” “Bachelor in Paradise,” and, recently, “Bachelor Winter Games”—has become a mainstay of American reality television, transforming the competition of “Multi-Millionaire” into something much more baroque, and shrouding its mercenary quality in the language and soft lighting of romance. The TV landscape is lousy with more or less unscripted, improbably themed series—from “Lip Sync Battle” to “Basketball Wives LA” and “Hunting Hitler”—but the aims of “The Bachelor” have proved impressively static. (Almost unbelievably, the series didn’t introduce its first black lead, the Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay, until 2017.) Any enjoyment I’ve derived from the show over the years has had less to do with its dramatic plot points (A former boyfriend appears to stake his claim on one of the contestants! A contestant steals away to sleep covertly with the Bachelor!) than its predictability.
According to Kaufman, such stately rhythms are the result of painfully hard work. An entertainment journalist at the Los Angeles Times and a longtime fan of the show (she has, she writes, a “bach discush” cohort), Kaufman has procured damning production notes, revealing the show’s behind-the-scenes manipulation of participants, beginning with the ground rules established at the Agoura Hills, California, mansion where “The Bachelor” is filmed. No electronic devices or reading materials are allowed there, nor is contact with the outside world provided. Competition is kindled not only between the contestants but also among the on-set producers, who battle for seniority and money (at times, literally, for hundred-dollar bills doled out by their superiors), by attempting to create moments of onscreen tension. They throw participants into states of heightened fear during televised dates (a bungee-jumping gathering for the heights-averse contestant, say), veer between intimidation and intimacy to secure information, and keep track of contestants’ menstruation cycles, targeting them when they are at their most vulnerable in order to achieve more affecting and dramatically satisfying scenes.
Like Kaufman, the Canadian poet and academic Suzannah Showler is a self-professed fan of the show, and she has also recently written a book about it, “Most Dramatic Ever: The Bachelor.” Unlike Kaufman, Showler didn’t talk to any sources, because, as she writes, “Uh, I didn’t really want to.” Instead, she studies the show using the tools of literary analysis, treating it as a text whose form provides meaning. Less attuned to the motivations of individual actors, Showler is more interested in interrogating the ways in which the show works systematically—analyzing, for instance, how the contestants’ life traumas are, as a rule, converted into connection, creating an economy where “confessional narrative is a form of Bachelor currency.” In recent years, she suggests, the producers have increasingly allowed reality to enter the insular spectacle of the show (as, for instance, when the Southern-belle Bachelorette Emily Maynard acknowledged on camera that she knew about a past affair that one of the contestants had had with a “Bachelor” producer). Such intrusions are carefully calibrated to imply that the show’s authenticity is total, Showler proposes, while, in fact, the producers carefully control how many of its seams they will expose.
Despite their different approaches, both Kaufman’s and Showler’s books are primarily preoccupied with the question of feeling. How sincere is a show, they ask, that professes to be about true emotions while manipulating its participants? And what is the right amount of emotional distance that viewers should be able keep from “The Bachelor”? Nearly twenty years ago, in her groundbreaking book “No Logo,” Naomi Klein referred to a type of engagement with popular culture that she called “ironic consumption,” wherein people, realizing their inability to detach from the often idiotic, occasionally poisonous products of capitalism, partake instead of these products’ pleasures while keeping a sense of agency and humor about it. Kaufman’s and Showler’s books remind us that this attitude is, today, often subsumed by a stance that looks past irony to find sincere enjoyment and edification in wholly commercial works. Viewers such as herself, Showler writes, are “aware of the preposterousness of the situation” presented on the show, and of its pandering to gendered and racial stereotypes; and yet, she writes, “I fucking love The Bachelor.” For her part, Kaufman notes that “no one takes a show about twenty-five women vying for one man seriously”; and yet, if given the chance to try out for the show, she writes, “I WOULD STILL. FUCKING. APPLY.” This admission is followed by another reversal: “That’s pretty dark, right? What is wrong with me? Why do I want to be that girl?” The fault lines between enjoyment and irony, critique and complicity, are treacherous; the back-and-forth is ongoing, insistent, recursive. A moment later, Kaufman is moved to earnest query once again: “What does it mean to be the chosen one?”
Monday saw the airing of the three-hour finale of the twenty-second season of “The Bachelor,” which had been hyped relentlessly by the show’s host, Chris Harrison, as the most dramatic and controversial “Bachelor” climax yet. In it, the unbelievably dull Arie Luyendyk, Jr., a salt-and-pepper-haired race-car driver turned Arizona real-estate agent, who resembles a model for the UNTUCKit shirt company, waffled between the blonde Lauren B. and the brunette Becca K. The drama heightened toward a long, unedited two-camera segment (the first in “Bachelor” history, Harrison reminded us more than once), in which Arie decided to break off his engagement with Becca K. in order to “try again” with Lauren B. The footage was, indeed, “raw,” and Becca wept. (In yesterday’s ritualized “After the Final Rose” special, which unpacks the proposal and its aftermath at the end of every “Bachelor” season, it was announced to much excitement that she will play the role of the new Bachelorette this spring, and the tears were replaced by the audience’s whoops and hollers, and the introduction of a number of Becca’s future suitors.) And yet the whole thing still read as practiced. It wasn’t false, exactly, but it did crystallize the kind of going-through-the-motions routine that resides deep within our boring human souls—like stealing a glance at oneself in the mirror while sobbing. My nearly seven-year-old daughter, trying to dodge her bedtime and hovering curiously behind me as I watched, asked, “This isn’t real, is it?”
In her book, Showler argues that the unions that take place on “The Bachelor” are, in fact, not so different from real-life marriages. This is a show, Showler writes, “that has always pretended to be about the production of fantasy, but is really about how people make do . . . under inadequate conditions,” just like in real life. The enjoyment one can glean from the show relies on this relatability, but also on the hairline gap between true emotions and interactions and their onscreen representations, and the ability to tell the difference between the two—to identify the way the artificial structures that the show puts in place do not make up the entire story. But in the conclusion to her book, which was written after Trump’s ascent to the Presidency, Showler does seem a little chastened by her easy acceptance of the “lower-order authenticity” of “The Bachelor.” “What does it mean to live under false premises?” she asks. In our new, almost literally unbelievable era, she adds, “one is forced to recalibrate not only a sense of moral clarity, but a more basic, factual understanding of what is real.” She sounds, suddenly, mournful.
