Pop Culture Confessions: The Bachelor

Reunited and it feels so good

I need you to believe me when I tell you that a not insignificant number of my most precious personal memories revolve around The Bachelor franchise.

Yes, I realize this might sound a little OTT (this, I’ve learned from my friends on Love Island UK, is a cool shorthand for “over the top”) and no, I’m not suggesting that I’m proud of it… but it’s true.

Like many millennials, my friends and I had a full ritual around The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Bachelor in Paradise when we were in our twenties. Throughout my time in New York, I had a standing date to watch the show with two of my best friends. For years (literally), we would rotate hosts and convene at one of our apartments every Monday night at seven o’clock. We ordered the same Thai take-out each week—a component of the routine with such staying power that we didn’t even double-check the details of everyone’s order before calling in our spring rolls and curries and noodles. If you were hosting, you were responsible for calling in a delivery of the same items we’d had the week before. If you were a guest, it was up to you to show up with a bottle of wine. Either way, you got to cuddle up on the couch with your close pals for two hours every week and descend into some mindless entertainment and hopeless romanticism. I miss it.

My friends and I certainly didn’t invent the (rose) ceremony of the Bachelor watch party—but my history with the show goes wayyyy back. One of my earliest memories of true indulgence involves snuggling up with my mom to watch the finale of Trista’s season in a hotel room in Chicago. We were going through a tough time and the weekend trip was meant to serve as a distraction from what was happening at home. We spent the day at the original American Girl Place and I picked out a pair of True Religion jeans that made me feel like a million bucks. At the end of the day, rather than continuing with our spree of treating ourselves, we opted to put on our fluffy matching robes, order room service, and—at long last!—find out if the first-ever Bachelorette would choose Ryan Sutter or Charlie Maher for her happily ever after. Thankfully, she made the undeniably correct choice with the former. To this day, I maintain that Ryan was my first real TV crush—and that this girls weekend in Chicago and the fancy-feeling evening I spent with my mom watching The Bachelorette were among the most formative, meaningful experiences of my tween years.

I don’t need to get into the details of the ways in which the seemingly countless other seasons of the franchises’s various shows are tied to my memories of the last two decades. Suffice it to say that I have watched almost every season—with a few exceptions.

In 2017, I made a scene about skipping the season starring Nick Viall—so much so that I wrote about it for Refinery29. More recently, I declared that I needed a break after so many seasons that promised unprecedented drama but simply felt like more of the same. I sat out Zach’s season of The Bachelor, Charity’s season of The Bachelorette, and the most recent round of Bachelor in Paradise. I also missed The Golden Bachelor, though I’m tempted to revisit it after seeing how much love it’s received.

But here’s the big news: at least for now, I’m back, baby!

It seemed like there was no better time to jump back into one of my oldest guilty pleasures than this post-partum period—especially since a new season happened to premiere the week after Will’s arrival.

Thanks to Joey (and Will), The Bachelor and I are reunited… and it feels so good.

A new installment of Pop Culture Confessions feels practically required to mark the moment.

As a reminder, Pop Culture Confessions is a place where I break down the media I love but feel weird (or worse) about. I’ll give myself the space to fangirl while also being transparent about my ambivalence (or worse) and how I might be able to untangle it.

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Other editions of Pop Culture Confessions have called for a more in-depth history of the relevant piece of media. Given the reach and success of the Bachelor franchise, I don’t think that’s necessary here. Whether you watch the shows obsessively or have never seen an episode, I’m confident that you have a general understanding of how they work and how big they are. While ratings and viewership have taken a hit over the last few years, it would be unfair to forget just how big of a hit Mike Fleiss’s creations were early on! At the show’s peak, it was attracting more than 12 million sets of eyes. Numbers like that just don’t happen in today’s streaming world… and certainly not in Bachelor-land, where people like me are jaded after so many years of “the most dramatic season yet.”

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Currently Reading: Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

I’m still having a great time with this one! I’m anxious to see how the individual stories of the three main characters will continue to work together, but in the meantime, I like the ride that each subplot is taking me on. Kiley is such a master of writing about the awkwardness of being a person in the world, and I find myself laughing out loud at the way she gets dialogue on the page.

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Let’s talk about some of my hang-ups around The Bachelor and its adjacent shows…

• It would seem that the show has been responsive to concerns about this in recent years, but any critique would be incomplete without a mention of the lack of diversity in casting. We’re talking about diversity of every sort: racial diversity, body diversity, religious diversity, disability rep… the list goes on. It’s refreshing to see progress being made here, but it certainly came later than it should have. Has it been enough? I would leave that to representatives of the communities who have been marginalized by the show to determine.

• It has a nasty habit of portraying women in a way that plays into misogynist, sexist ideas. I am, of course, speaking in binary terms, and that’s partially because the Bachelor’s apparently rigid commitment to that gender binary is also worth mentioning. In any case, Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise producers, in particular, seem to have no reservations about crafting storylines that pin women against each other and centering the kind of petty drama in which women are often teased for participating. While male contestants are also crafted into villains, my impression is that more glee is taken in constructing those personas for women who appear on the show.