Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  I prefer the seasons of The Bachelorette—I’m not going to lie. I obviously love watching a group of dudes fight for the attention of a woman, so there’s that. And with time, the suitors are learning to compliment the intellect and personality of the Bachelorettes—not just their looks. I don’t exactly love that The Bachelor advances and fuels the narrative that women on TV are . . . well, the way they’re portrayed on The Bachelor.

  I think that this is a show where you can learn about and engage with your own sense of feminism. I have only ever viewed the series through this lens, but my understanding of the dynamics therein has become more thorough as I’ve gotten older. I actually think that as the women become more empowered to speak their minds on the series, it provides audiences with more opportunities to learn about feminism. We’re even starting to hear that word on the show, which is very exciting to me.

  I spent six years on Girls, a show that sometimes taught feminism by showing examples of the characters’ misguided attempts at feminism—but all of it was told from the point of view of a production staff, writers’ room, actors, and director list that was definitely feminist. You can’t only absorb the ideals of a feminist world view through shows that espouse them—often, there are more lessons to learn about womanhood on shows where the women (or, more typically, the men) are behaving in ways that proliferate misogyny in one way or another. Especially if you’re watching the show with other women—as many people do—there are teaching moments every few minutes.

  I find myself wishing the characters would just say, “Let’s put a ring on my finger that belongs to Neil Lane, and then we can start dating and see if we actually like each other in the real world.” Because it’s always too obvious to the audience, once we see the couple reunited “After the Final Rose,” . . . that the prospect of planning a wedding seems insane to them. They all have this vibe about them that projects: “Give us a minute. We essentially just met.”

  And increasingly, it feels absurd that they don’t know anything about what’s happening in the outside world. The fact that the election came and went without hearing any mention of it on this show . . . feels impossible. I would give anything to see a political discussion within this group, but maybe that’s just me. Also, that would give them something to talk about on their dates outside of their past relationships, et cetera. What can’t you learn about someone’s outlook on the world through a healthy debate about health-care policy?

  —Allison Williams, actress (Girls, Get Out)

  CHAPTER 3

  The Roots of Television Romance

  Since The Bachelor began airing in 2002, dozens of reality television producers have tried to capitalize on the success of the dating-show genre. We’ve watched people date naked. Date in the dark. Date millionaires. Date pretend millionaires. Date Tila Tequila.

  No matter how extreme the gimmick, the Bachelor franchise has spawned the only modern-day dating shows with any serious longevity. Because of the lack of substantial competition in the current TV marketplace, though, it’s easy to forget the shows that paved the way for The Bachelor’s ascendancy.

  The first man to put dating on TV was Chuck Barris, the renowned creator of shows like The Dating Game and The Gong Show. And in some ways, Barris and Mike Fleiss are cut from the same cloth. Like Fleiss, Barris possessed an innate understanding of what viewers wanted to see—the kind of stuff that critics often deemed morally bankrupt, too provocative, and culturally damaging.

  Both men also came up through academia, never intending on going into television. A Philadelphia native, Barris studied industrial management at the Drexel Institute of Technology. After graduating in 1953, however, his career ambitions shifted, and he took a job as a page in NBC’s trainee program. Eventually, he moved to ABC, where he was hired to keep an eye on Dick Clark, who was in the midst of the payola scandal. The network moved him from New York to California, and he was named ABC’s West Coast director of daytime programming.

  But he wasn’t long for the gig. After spending so much time observing Clark on-set, Barris came to believe he himself had what it took to create a successful television show of his own. So he quit ABC, borrowed $20,000 from his stepfather, and convinced the network to spend $7,800 on an idea he had for a pilot.

  The premise? One eligible young woman would be matched with three male suitors—but she couldn’t see her potential dates. The men were hidden behind a partition, and the woman had to decide who she wanted to go out with by asking them questions and judging their answers. (The show also worked in reverse, with one man and three hidden women.) Barris hired a little-known radio disc jockey from San Francisco, Jim Lange, to host the program, which he dubbed The Dating Game.

  Though Barris felt good about the pilot, ABC initially turned it down. And since they’d funded the test run, he couldn’t shop it to other buyers. Fortunately, just a few weeks later, a couple of the network’s game shows proved to be ratings failures, and desperate to fill the daytime slots, they gave The Dating Game a chance.

  “I got a call that said we were going on the air and I was so excited it was pathetic,” Barris recalled in a 2010 interview with the Archive of American Television. I tried to interview Barris myself but was told by his wife that he was too ill to speak on the phone; he died shortly after that exchange in March 2017 at age eighty-seven.

  When The Dating Game debuted in December 1965, there were a handful of game shows already on the air: Let’s Make a Deal, Match Game, Jeopardy!, Password. But Barris’s show was the first on American television to delve into contestants’ personal and romantic lives. As he put it in a 2011 conversation with his alma mater: “Television at that time was all question-and-answer shows and stuff like that, and this was spontaneity. That was never, ever in television before. There wasn’t a correct answer to a question on The Dating Game.”

  Despite the groovy-looking flower-power daisies that decorated the set walls—and even though it was filmed in Hollywood, which the show dubbed the “dating capital of the world”—The Dating Game was relatively tame at first. The show launched during a seminal moment in the cultural landscape. Troops were still embedded in Vietnam, and the antiwar movement was growing rapidly, resulting in protests and civil unrest. Just as men’s hair was growing longer, women’s skirts were getting shorter—the miniskirt had just come onto the fashion scene from London. The Beatles and the Grateful Dead were topping the music charts, and more than 400,000 people would soon travel to upstate New York to romp scantily clad in the mud at Woodstock.

  But it would take a while for The Dating Game to reflect the culture. At first, the men came out dressed in stiff blazers and ties and often touted their college credentials. While the women sported flirtier shift dresses with bell sleeves, the questions they asked of their mystery men were rather demure.

  When you feel low down and blue, what do you usually do to get back in the groove?

  If you were a work of art, what would you look like?

  Pretend you are Confucius. Make up a special little proverb for me right now.

  Robert Browning won Elizabeth by poetry. Let me hear some poetry that would win me.

  You’ve hurt my feelings and I feel really bad and I’m about ready to break out in tears. Would you tell me you’re sorry?

  Such questions might seem lame now, but television critics of the era were horrified by the show. “Daytime Television Hits All Time Low,” a Chicago Tribune headline declared. Lange was so rattled by the review that he wondered if he should quit the hosting gig. “In my opinion, a good game show review is the kiss of death,” Barris recalled telling the host in his 1993 memoir, The Game Show King. “If for some strange reason the critic liked it, the public won’t. A really bad review means the show will be on for years.”

  Indeed, The Dating Game would go on to air for decades. While its initial run on ABC came to an end in 1973, the show was revived three more times in s
yndication. Lange still presided as host on the first revival, from 1978 to 1980. By that time, Barris had already created a handful of other shows, including the hit The Newlywed Game, on which three newly married couples competed to prove which pair knew each other best. Barris himself had also begun hosting The Gong Show, where amateur performers showed off talents for a trio of celebrity judges—any of whom could strike a massive gong if the act wasn’t to their liking. (No, Mike Myers—ahem, Tommy Maitland—was not the original host of The Gong Show.)

  Barris’s wacky personality was key to the success of The Gong Show. He came onstage dressed in a tuxedo jacket and bell-bottom jeans that were so loose they looked as if they might slip off at any moment. He sounded so spaced-out that he said viewers often questioned whether he was high. And when he came under fire for his willingness to humiliate Average Joes on television, he insisted his programs were all made in the spirit of good fun.

  “The contestants on our shows come because they have a good time,” he told Mike Wallace in one particularly testy 60 Minutes interview. “These people don’t take participating on a game show as seriously as you think they do, Mike. It’s not a big sociological thing. They just want to have some fun.”

  Soon, Barris’s reputation on The Gong Show began to affect his other programs. When The Dating Game came back for its first reincarnation in 1978, he told his staff to push the boundaries this time around. No more staid bachelors in suits and ties. Instead, production scouted for single stand-up comedians at the Improv comedy club in Hollywood.

  “The ’70s version of the show was purposefully out-there, because Chuck was known for The Gong Show, so they told us we better be silly,” said David Greenfield, who began working as a producer on The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game in the late ’70s. “Whereas The Dating Game in the ’60s was much more provincial. They’d make a big deal if a couple got married. ‘Oh, do you remember John and July? Look at how cute they are!’ When I worked on the show, no one got married.”

  Busy with The Gong Show, meanwhile, Barris remained relatively hands-off. He hardly ever visited set, according to Greenfield, but his presence was still felt at the office.

  “My very first week at ABC—I’m twenty-three years old—and I see Chuck riding a motorcycle down the hallway of the office,” Greenfield said. “On his birthday, we got him a huge cake, and what did he do with the cake? He jumped in it. That was Chuck. He had to do stuff like that.”

  As a producer, Greenfield was responsible for prepping the women and helping them come up with questions before walking onstage. Another producer was put in charge of the men, while Greenfield said he landed with the women because he was “cute—then—and tan.” During the pre-show briefings, he told the female contestants to “get salacious” and talk about their sex life. There’s nothing funny about describing your perfect date, he advised. And then came his most important move.

  “Before the first show, the executive producer came up to me and said, ‘I don’t care how you do it, but when those girls come out onstage, I want their nipples erect.’ Now, I don’t know if he meant turn the air conditioning up or what. But sometimes they would put a chair in the room, so I would come in, and as sad as this sounds today, I would straddle the girl as I asked her questions.”

  And how did the female contestants not completely freak out over this? (Slash not file sexual harassment charges against ABC?)

  “Freak out?” Greenfield asked incredulously. “It was the ’70s. Everybody was doing cocaine. They were smoking dope. There was free sex. It was a totally different time.

  “The stuff I got away with, really, is astonishing,” he acknowledged. “I couldn’t do any of that now. You ask a girl out on a date and they’d fire you.”

  Greenfield did other things behind the scenes on The Dating Game that he’s not particularly proud of either. Once, he invited a little person on the show—a guy with a great personality—and put him up against two drips he knew the woman wouldn’t find appealing.

  “So she picks the little guy and he comes around the partition like, ‘Oh—hi,’” said Greenfield, who is sixty-two now. “She cried so much after that show. I apologized so much. It was the worst thing I ever did. The fact that I set her up with a midget, a little person? It’s not a nice thing to do. But at twenty-three, twenty-four—to me, it was funny—until after the fact. If anything, I matured and learned from that. Just stick to the program.”

  Anyway, he knew how others in the business thought of the reality show. The Dating Game shared offices with Goodson-Todman, the production company responsible for wholesome programs like Family Feud and Beat the Clock.

  “We’d rib each other in the elevator. It’d be like, ‘What are you guys doing, antonyms this week? That’s a fascinating show.’ And they’d say back, ‘Well, what are you doing? Showing girls’ you-know-whats this week?’”

  But no matter how playful The Dating Game got, there was only so much that you could say about a couple of people who’d just been introduced on-camera.

  Enter Love Connection. In 1983, television producer Eric Lieber debuted the first game show to actually send two singles on real dates.

  “The Dating Game was terrific, but what happens after the date? That was the genesis of what Eric wanted to do with the show,” said coordinating producer Tim Crescenti, who worked on Love Connection for eight years. (Lieber died in 2008 at age seventy-one.)

  Still, viewers weren’t privy to footage from the dates. Instead, the audience was introduced to a man and a woman who had already gone out with each other. One half of the couple—let’s say the woman, in this case—walked onto a pink-and-purple set decorated with hearts. She sat down on a couch across from host Chuck Woolery, whom you may recognize nowadays from late-night TV commercials in which he hawks a digital device that supposedly cures joint pain.

  Then Woolery began to ask the woman about the three potential suitors she had to choose from for her date. Clips of each of the men the woman had considered played, and the studio audience then voted on whom they thought was her best match. This was an odd concept, since the date had already occurred, but in any event—the audience results were revealed, and then the woman said whom she’d selected.

  This was when we’d finally start to get some good juice about the date. The man whom the woman had chosen—supposedly sitting backstage—would pop up on an overhead screen. The two would relay stories about what happened on their date, and then, if the woman decided she wanted to see the man again, he’d walk out from backstage and they’d smooch and celebrate.

  The freedom the daters were given was pretty impressive, considering the intense background checks reality TV producers use these days. First, those auditioning would be rated on what Love Connection staff called the PALIO scale: Personality, Appearance, Lifestyle, Intelligence, and Occupation. If your score was high enough—and you were a Southern California resident over the age of twenty-one—you’d be matched up with a stranger and sent on a date without any real screening. After being handed $75 by production, you’d be told to head out on your date, which could take place anywhere except a location that wasn’t conducive to conversation: No movies. No concerts. No plays. If you were lucky, sometimes producers would suggest an idea they’d stumbled across in L.A. Weekly—a festival, a fair, or a well-reviewed restaurant.

  After you’d gone on your date on a Friday, you and your date partner would each receive a call on Monday from a segment producer, who’d grill you both on what went down.

  “The producer would call and say, ‘Well, Amy, how did your date go with Tim?’” explained Crescenti. “‘Oh, we had a nice time. We went to dinner. It was a nice time.’ Well, that’s not good television. So you call Tim and ask how the date went. ‘Oh, she was nice.’ ‘What did you think of her?’ ‘I thought she was great.’ ‘She’s OCD about cleanliness. Did that come up?’ After Tim talks about that, you call Amy back and say, ‘T
im said your apartment was a wreck.’ ‘He said that? What?’ Then all of a sudden you start to get somewhere.”

  Of course, Crescenti admitted, the goal here was not truly to create lasting relationships.

  Of more than 2,000 episodes, he estimated that about two dozen marriages came out of the show. If a contestant came into an audition and started to say how eager they were to find a spouse, they’d be reminded by a producer that “first and foremost, this is an entertainment show. If you’re here to find a husband or wife, you’re probably in the wrong room.”

  “There were some people who saw it as a last resort,” Crescenti explained. “Like, ‘Boy, I’ve tried everything. Might as well go on this big television show where they know what they’re doing.’”

  Little did the daters know that if a woman was deciding which of her three options to go out with, she’d often be urged to pick someone she wasn’t actually compatible with. “Unknown to you, he has an opinion politically, socially, chauvinistically that’s going to trigger something on the date and make great television,” Crescenti said. “We might show you a five-minute segment of his video that looks very favorable, but the guy is a chauvinistic jerk and you don’t see that on the tape.”

  After the producer-led debriefing sessions, a few scant details from the date would be relayed to Woolery. And that was the way the host preferred it. He liked to wing it, discovering information in real-time so that he’d have more authentic reactions on-camera. If, however, the couple had slept together on their date, Woolery would be informed via an offstage cue card that read “Boink Date.”

  “We couldn’t even ask outright, ‘Did you have sex on the date?’” said Crescenti. “They would have to kind of gingerly walk around that. Chuck would say, ‘How did the date end?’ The guy would go, ‘Well, you know, Chuck, when I woke up the next morning—’ and you’d hear the crowd go ‘Whoaaaa.’ It was quite a throwback.”