Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  By now, though, popular culture had become more sexual: Movies like Flashdance and Octopussy had women dressed in barely there outfits. Michael Jackson was grabbing his genitals onstage. So to many women, Woolery represented a kind of wholesome everyman. In fact, when asked about the kind of guy they’d like to go out with, many of the women who auditioned for the show said they hoped he’d resemble the host.

  “A lot of the ladies found him handsome and charming,” Crescenti said, noting that Woolery served as host for twelve years, until the show was rebooted for a season in 1998. “And yet he was an approachable, accessible guy. He was an everyman who wasn’t super slick, which was great. I think that was his appeal. He didn’t have that ‘I’m better than you’ attitude. [Creator] Eric Lieber said he was the perfect host because he felt like the host of a cocktail party, or your son-in-law. Likable, safe, and oh, he’s handsome.”

  If Love Connection were on the air today, Crescenti believes, “people would think: Snoozeville! They’d want footage from the date, faster cuts, more sex.

  “They take people on an epic journey on The Bachelor. It’s a storybook romance,” said the producer. “Love Connection wasn’t about getting another date. If that does happen, wonderful. But this is not a beautiful love story like The Bachelor.”

  Of course, just a few weeks after Crescenti uttered these words, news broke that Bravo guru Andy Cohen—he of Watch What Happens Live and Real Housewives reunion fame—was set to host a Fox reboot of Love Connection.

  Even better? The show’s producer is Mike Fleiss.

  “Love Connection was always one of my favorite programs,” Fleiss said in a press release when the news was announced, a few months before the revival’s summer 2017 debut. “Show creator Eric Lieber was a close friend of mine. He taught me a lot about the relationship show format. The first rule—if the cast is good, just stay out of the way.”

  Indeed, Lieber was the “George Steinbrenner of television shows,” according to Crescenti. He demanded the best, and if you didn’t play by his rules, you were sent packing. Because he was such a taskmaster, there was always a revolving door at Love Connection. Writers were often told their segments weren’t up to par, and producers were pushed to mine for juicier information from the daters.

  “Each segment had to be tantalizing,” Crescenti said. “Eric wanted to make sure things really had a perspective—whether it was lovey-dovey and charming and oozing with affection, or ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe she said that.’ Nothing in between.”

  Before his death from leukemia, Lieber told the Chicago Sun-Times that he most enjoyed “the couples who rag on each other”—though he copped to being depressed when he learned one of the pairs who had wed on the program had since gotten divorced.

  “The show succeeds because we believe in honest emotions,” he said in the 1992 interview. “And, admit it: We’re all a little voyeuristic and enjoy peeking into someone else’s life.”

  Accordingly, the next hit dating show dug even deeper into viewers’ voyeuristic tendencies. In 1995, MTV premiered Singled Out, hosted by a then little-known Playboy model named Jenny McCarthy and a Los Angeles radio DJ, Chris Hardwick.

  While Love Connection had remained pretty meek—hello, “boink date”—Singled Out capitalized on the sex-fueled spring-break culture of the mid-’90s. The show was raunchy, loud, and high-energy, typically starting with a camera pan of fifty young daters screaming their heads off. In an attempt to replicate what it was like to meet someone in a real-life bar setting, the show selected more than three dozen singles and offered them up to one lucky man or woman—or the “picker,” as they were known on-set.

  The picker—let’s use a woman in this scenario—would be seated on an oversized, gaudy heart-shaped throne, hidden from the view of their dating pool. Then Hardwick or McCarthy would ask her a question about her ideal mate that almost always had to do with physical attraction, like “blond or brunette?” If she answered blond, all the brown-haired dudes would immediately walk by her throne and exit the stage. (She did have the option of saving one of the guys as they passed, if she so chose.) She’d then answer another question: “Do you like to be on top or on bottom?” Welp, she’s into missionary, so all the dudes who like her on top are goners.

  After a few probing questions, there’d be between five to eight guys remaining, and it was on to “Keep ’Em or Dump ’Em.” Each man would introduce himself and give a cheesy one-liner—“My name is Chris, and no woman can resist my luscious kiss”—and the woman would decide who sounded best. Her final picks would then attempt to make their way into the “winners’ circle” by answering some “deeper” questions and hoping their answers matched those of the picker. “Valentine’s Day: a celebration of love or a waste of money?” A true celebration, obviously!

  Whoever reached the picker first was subsequently placed back-to-back with her, and then the two were finally allowed to look at each other for the first time. The lovebirds would be offered a complimentary date—perhaps whisked off in a limo to a horseback ride past the Hollywood sign—and that was that.

  “I think we were just trying to have fun,” Gary Auerbach, one of Singled Out’s executive producers, told me. “MTV had a very strong brand at the time, and it was the one place you went to have fun and celebrate. People in their twenties and younger—that was pretty much all they watched.”

  Like on Love Connection, the aim here was not to create long-lasting relationships. Kallissa Miller, another of the show’s EPs, said the show tried to own its vapidness, and “most critics got that the entertainment value overrode the shallowness.”

  Even so, MTV had concerns about how far to push the envelope. After hiring Hardwick as the male host, the network initally wrestled with the idea of bringing on McCarthy as well. “MTV had an issue with her being in Playboy,” recalled Auerbach, noting that the comely blonde was Playmate of the Year at the time. But after going through the final run-through of the pilot with a different female cohost alongside Hardwick, executives realized they needed McCarthy to make the show work.

  “Both men and women liked her because she was sexy but kind of tomboyish,” Auerbach said. “She was kind of gross and had fun and didn’t get offended by anything.”

  “She was willing to stick her tongue out and be all silly,” added Miller. “Now, that just seems like, ‘Oh, yeah, of course. So many girls are willing to do that.’ But back then, to have somebody as beautiful as her being like, ‘Oh, I’ll fart on TV’—that was redeeming.”

  By the third season of the show, McCarthy had become a ubiquitous pop culture presence. Miller remembered being on a plane and flipping through Entertainment Weekly, stumbling upon an article talking about the top ten things the hostess had in her closet.

  “Almost every edition had something about Jenny, and I know, because Chris was jealous,” said Miller. “He would come to me and be like, ‘How come Jenny’s getting all the press?’”

  Both Hardwick, who has hosted Comedy Central’s talk show @midnight and NBC’s game show The Wall, and McCarthy, who has her own Sirius XM radio show, declined my interview requests. But according to Miller, the tension between the two was palpable—though it never veered into spiteful territory.

  “I wouldn’t say they were BFFs,” she acknowledged, “but they had a brother-sister relationship. Like if your sister’s getting more attention from your parents, you say, ‘How come you’re buying her a new car? What about me?’ That’s how it was for Chris. And his success was linked to her success, so when he saw all these articles in Entertainment Weekly—he’s a smart guy, and he realized that.”

  After four seasons, McCarthy decided she was ready to move on to greener pastures anyway, and she landed her own sketch comedy program on MTV, The Jenny McCarthy Show. (It debuted in 1997 and was canceled after just one season.) For the final two seasons of Singled Out, the network cast Carmen Electra, a model who was b
est known at the time for—shocker!—posing nude in Playboy.

  “Jenny is funnier and Carmen is sexier, so I think what ended up happening is [Carmen] took on more of a traditional, almost Vanna White–esque role,” said Miller. “That’s when Chris shined a bit harder, because there were no longer two comedians vying for the funny role.”

  As the show gained popularity, MTV began fielding requests from managers seeking to place their clients on Singled Out—and a handful of celebrities like Jennifer Love Hewitt and Fergie (then Stacy Ferguson, just a singer in the pop trio Wild Orchid) ended up as pickers.

  Now, a decade on, Miller sees Singled Out as a precursor to dating apps like Tinder. The show allowed pickers to flip through dozens of options quickly, making love feel more like a fun game than an overwhelming prospect.

  “The idea that you could have fifty guys or girls wanting you is really seductive,” she said. “The idea of choice—that massive quantity—had a game element to it that always appealed to everybody.”

  Singled Out went off the air in 1998 after five seasons. But it wasn’t long before Blind Date came along to pick up where the MTV juggernaut had left off. When Blind Date kicked off in syndication in 1999, viewers were finally able to watch as two people ventured off-set and into the real world, following a man and a woman who’d never met before as they went out on their first date. And we’re not just talking coffee or drinks. The couple would meet early in the afternoon and drive themselves to a total of four locations over the course of a day—making the whole thing a ten-hour affair, minimum.

  And there was a twist: After the date concluded, witty writers would come up with jokes to fill text bubbles that would pop up throughout the episode. The messages were meant to mirror viewers’ own thoughts about the daters or add context to a situation. Like if a guy showed up for his date looking really extreme—bright-orange jumpsuit, scarf tied around his neck, leopard-print fedora—we’d read: “We swear he dressed normal at his audition!” Or maybe a dude made a comment about his attractiveness—he didn’t think he was a “10.” Suddenly, “That makes two of us!” would pop up over his date’s head. You get the idea.

  At first, the show wasn’t conceived with the pop-up bubbles. Executive producers Jay Renfroe and David Garfinkle—who have since gone on to create the mega-popular survival program Naked and Afraid—initially thought they might have enough of a show if they just went out in the field and shot blind dates without any gimmicks.

  “But watching two people on a date turned out to be extremely boring,” Renfroe recalled, sitting in his office at his production company’s Sherman Oaks headquarters. “They don’t really say what they mean. So we had the idea to turn it into a human comic strip. We used smart writers to give those characters voices and say what we were all thinking but couldn’t say.”

  But it wasn’t all snark. Production actually hired a psychologist to consult on the dates and weigh in on the odds of the couples working out. The shrink would analyze the pair’s body language and choice of words so that “we could ground the humor in some sort of reality,” Renfroe said. “We would let people dig their own graves first. We never dug the grave for them. So if you saw a guy meet a girl and immediately put her into the category of ‘sex only’—and that’s what guys do—then the second he did something like that, he was open game.”

  Soon, ratings were strong enough that production was able to travel outside of Los Angeles to follow daters in cities like Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Chicago. Renfroe even got a call from one of David Letterman’s staffers on The Late Show after one particularly memorable episode in which a woman supposedly passed gas numerous times during her date. “They told me that the writers were taking bets about did this girl really pass gas twenty-seven times during the period of the date,” Renfroe said with a laugh.

  While the show easily found an audience, it wasn’t exactly an incubator for years-long relationships. Of the 1,500 episodes that were filmed over the show’s seven-year run, Renfroe could recall only three couples getting married. Auditioning daters for the show, he was surprised to find how few singles seemed to know what they were looking for in a partner.

  “We’d ask them who was their type and then try to match people up with exactly the guy or girl that they described,” Renfroe said. “But then we’d send them out and they’d hate each other. And if we sent a girl out with a guy who wasn’t exactly what she said she was looking for, they’d usually hit it off. Because I don’t think people really verbalize what they want. They’re not always that truthful about what they really connect to.”

  There was also little to mask one’s true character on the show. From the moment a man arrived on a woman’s doorstep, it was evident whether or not they were attracted to each other. And if the pair didn’t seem to be a match, things would get awkward fast. There were long car rides filled with uncomfortable silence. But with a cameraman sticking his lens into the back seat, the daters often felt pressure to talk—and not just about their favorite movies or pizza joints. “When you add cameras into the mix and crew who are expecting something, people feel like they need to perform,” Renfroe said. “And that forced people to talk about real things. You have to have more honest conversation about things of substance, because you can’t be lazy.”

  There also weren’t any lavish, fantastical locations to distract from the one-on-one interaction. Early in the day, there’d usually be an activity—going to the beach, playing basketball, hitting up a comedy club. And then they’d head out to eat. Most of the dates took place at average-looking chain restaurants where the most important feature was the bar. And yes, more often than not, the contestants would get drunk—tequila shots at a Mexican restaurant, Coronas by the boardwalk, wine at an Italian place. (That’s when a taxi would come into play, chauffeuring the pair around for the rest of the evening.)

  “We didn’t have the Bachelor budget,” said Renfroe. “And they are selling romance. I think what we provided was reality. We had very relatable dates. I don’t know if everyone can relate to being swept away in a private plane to Paris for dinner.”

  One especially popular Blind Date destination was Splash, a now-defunct Los Angeles “spa” equipped with a plethora of super sanitary private hot-tub rooms. Producers loved the venue—for one, the show was allowed to film there for free—and it allowed for contestants to show some skin before they, almost always, started hooking up. Splash became so popular that in a later season, during a week of episodes featuring millionaire daters, the owner of the spa was sent on a date of his own. “So many people knew about the place from all the exposure that he’d made so much money,” Renfroe said.

  So many dates turned out to be total disasters—often in those very hot tubs—that Blind Date ended up serving as a cautionary tale for many viewers. Renfroe said he’d often hear from married couples who told him the show had saved their relationships. After watching, some audience members shared, “We’d say to ourselves, ‘Whatever problems we have, we can work them out. We just don’t want to have to do that again.’”

  No longer was it considered racy to make out on TV or bare your soul to millions of strangers. By the late nineties, nearly every teen had an AOL account, and some were even starting to find love in online chat rooms. We were beginning to market ourselves—making websites, blogging on LiveJournal—realizing that the Internet and television had the power to make us stand out from the crowd.

  Young people now dreamed of being on television, and MTV was there to make that fantasy attainable. Brian Graden, the network’s president of production around the millennium, had doubled down on dating shows. Teens would rush home to watch kids like themselves dating with the aid of their parents (Date My Mom), lie detectors (Exposed), and ultraviolet wands (Room Raiders).

  One of MTV’s most popular dating shows during this period was Next, in which a group of singles tried to find love on a bus. Because who among us hasn’t dre
amed of falling for someone while seated at a table that converts into a bed?

  Five guys, for example, would be secluded on an RV—known as the “Next bus”—that would roll around to different locations. At each stop, one young man would get off the bus and start a date with a woman at the helm. If at any point she didn’t feel like she was connecting with a guy, she could yell, “Next!” and he would have to retreat to the bus. At the next stop, she’d meet her next option.

  Like on The Bachelor, the bus added a helpful, bubble-esque intensity to Next. Contestants had no cell phones, and the windows on the vehicle had been blacked out. All the focus had to remain on the people inside the bus. Sometimes, on episodes with LGBTQ participants, matches started to form before the contestants even met the person they were meant to be fighting for.

  “It was always a party on the bus,” said Miller, who was an EP on Next. “Sometimes the dates would be really stiff, and we’d get on the walkies, like, ‘How’s the bus going?’ And they’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s a party in here! This one guy just bet another guy to shave his eyebrow off!’

  “My favorite shows to produce reveal natural, interesting dynamics between men and women,” continued Miller, who—after working on six MTV dating shows—is often called “The Queen of Dating” in the industry. “I see myself as a social anthropologist. And dating is the ultimate way to see how people connect.”

  Sure, she admits, Next may not have led to any great psychological discoveries about the mating habits of young adults. But she still thinks dating shows serve an important purpose.

  “You know when you get together with your girlfriend, and you almost want her to have gone on a bad date because the story is infinitely more interesting?” Miller asked. “We all know as women that you have to kiss nine frogs to get one prince. So why not enjoy the process? I meet so many women that are like, ‘Oh, I hate dating.’ And I’m always sad for women when I hear that—that they just want the end product. I think they’re missing out on a lot. I never want women to feel like they’re failing when they’re having a bad date. Most dates and relationships end. That’s just the way it is. But somehow, that’s not how it’s taught to us. I feel sad about that. It’s not embarrassing if you go out on a bad date. No, ladies, it’s fantastic. Let’s do brunch, and I want to hear every detail.”