No More Roses for The Bachelor

The Bachelor has been the only reality show I’ve watched consistently over the last 15 years (I had to stop myself and do the math…). I found the show funny and intriguing and ridiculous. I roped other people into watching the show with me because watching alone felt silly. Who was going to laugh at my witty jokes and cutting observations if I was in an empty room?!

This season the show went off the rails, though. The irony is that the show became too real. While we watched something every Monday night, actual real-life drama was happening in realtime with the people involved in the show.

Rachel Kirkconnell, the eventual “winner” of this season, had some bad pictures and stories dug up about her. In 2018 she liked racially insensitive photos and attended an antebellum party at an old plantation home - snapping pictures with her friends in fancy dresses. All of this was going on in the background as the first black lead Bachelor, Matt James, slowly fell for this girl from Georgia.

Adding fuel to the fire, Chris Harrison, the host of the show, and executive producer, came out and defended Rachel in an interview with a different Rachel, Rachel Lindsay (bad storytelling when you have two characters with the same name…). Harrison called out the “woke police” and wondered if the images only looked bad in hindsight within the context of 2021.

After some serious backlash, two weeks later Harrison “stepped back” as the host of the show. This past week it was announced he’d be replaced as host for the foreseeable future by two former contestants, Tayshia (yay!) and Kaitlin (meh). However, even after these announcements, we’d tune in on Monday nights and see Chris Harrison in an alternate-universe smiling and joshing around with contestants because the show had already been filmed.

The reality became too real and it became icky. Reality TV is all about train wrecks and drama, but it’s also about a bit of fun and humanity. This season had no fun and no laughs.

The Bachelor earns a big strike for handling a situation around race as poorly as they did. They rushed into naming Matt James the first Black bachelor on the heels of the Black Lives Matter protests in June. He was supposed to be a contestant on The Bachelorette, but his friendship with a former (BELOVED) contestant, Tyler C. landed him the gig as Bachelor. He had never been on the show, or on TV, before. The Bachelor franchise used him as a prop to display their support of an entire community. Matt James was the living embodiment of posting a black box or making your profile picture a rainbow.

It felt like it was all for show.

On top of all that mismanagement, the Bachelor has also taken a turn in how they portray anyone on the show. The beats and plots are always the same, and they have turned the pressure up on the contestants, manipulating them and editing the stories to make us hate contestants more than root for them.

I don’t want to do the math on how much time I have spent watching the Bachelor, but it’s time to cut the cord and step away. Sure, it might find it’s way on the TV every now and then. But I am certainly not taking notes while watching or recording a podcast with Tiff about it. It is no longer appointment viewing.

We’re out.

So, with that being said… Tiff and I do have fun podcasting to our tiny audience and are thinking about picking an older fictional TV show to watch and discuss.

That’s where you all come in. We’d love some ideas for old shows that you loved that we could podcast about. We have a list of our own and mention two options on this week’s Random Division episode.

Drop your thoughts in the comment section.