Mondays are for the Roses

Look, I know what you're thinking. The Bachelor, really? I expect you think this is yet another one of the Internet's long-winded defenses of reality TV from the perspective of a reality TV addict. And if the subject here is a "guilty-pleasure" show, i.e., the kind of show that offers an escape from reality, how is that a reality television show like The Bachelor can possibly offer some kind of escape from our present reality? I promise I'll attend to all of this if you stick around.

First, if such a thing as a target demographic exists for The Bachelor, I probably do not represent it. I'm a 29 year old cisgender, heterosexual dude, I have something that resembles a beard, and, while I'm never going to win a "Man of the Year" award for reasons that are, if you know me, obvious, I am nonetheless probably not the audience member that the producers behind Bachelor Nation picture when they direct an episode. I'm also kind of a snob when it comes to movies and television, and reality TV is generally the kind of thing at which I turn my nose up.

Second, however, requires another caveat: the year 2020. Suddenly, for reasons that are also obvious, we all found ourselves at home with more time on our hands than ever before. It stretched on, endlessly. Some of us baked bread. Others started exercising. Others bought Nintendos or puzzles, and others still taught themselves to knit hats and scarves and booties. I decided to make changes that were not just culinary, but professional -- I left one job track and started down the path towards another. It was a stressful time during a stressful year. During the long interim between jobs, I sat down one night beside my wife to tap out a few emails and job applications while she watched TV.

You know the rest. She was watching The Bachelor (actually, it was the recent season of The Bachelorette, though, the format is generally the same, which I now know because we have gone back in time by binge-watching almost every season, ever). The more I tried to focus on the work in front of me, the more I kept glancing up to see what was on the screen. I watched characters scheme, confess, wonder, wander, and worry, all in the span of an hour or two. People were laughing. A lot more were crying. I heard contestants wonder who was there "for the right reasons," and I heard some variation of "it's all about the journey" maybe 25,000 times.

I heard all this, and I was hooked.

OK, so The Bachelor series is compelling TV. It doesn't pain me to admit that now, admitted snob or not. But it's not compelling for the reasons you might think. It's not not because The Bachelor is actually representative of how love works or anything like that. It's not because its contestants are totally genuine, open, or honest. But what it does emphasize, in 2020, is something strange: it offers up a snapshot of what happens when a bunch of people are placed in close proximity to one another while cut off from the rest of the world. In this way, it offered up a slice of life that had been denied to us throughout the year, a degree of normalcy robbed of us by an out-of-control virus.

More than that, however, The Bachelor franchise itself offers up something else: it emphasizes what we think love should look like, even if that's not what it looks like to everyday people. That's one of the beautiful things about television. It doesn't teach us what things are actually like in real life. We know enough about that -- what are we watching TV for, after all, if not to get a glimpse of something else? Instead, TV teaches us what our culture thinks things ought to look like, or at least it shows us what we value. In 2020, The Bachelor zeroes in on relationships and love, just like it always does. Except this year those are things we especially crave, and they're also in short supply. A show like The Bachelor gives us a chance to experience them, even if we already know their reality show version is as far from reality as we can get.

Watch for the Rose Ceremony, and stick around for the journey itself. Trust me. You won't be disappointed.