Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  “A producer walks around and asks, ‘Who wants to be in a girl chat?’ And the girls who want air time are like, ‘Ooh, me! Me!’” explained Sharleen Joynt, a participant on Galavis’s season who loathed girl chats. “I said no every single time. But as the cast dwindled down, you had to participate. So you sit there and a producer’s like, ‘So, what do you think they’re doing on the date right now? Are you surprised that so-and-so got a rose? Can you believe girls are going home this week? Are you nervous?’”

  During the early years of the show, such chats weren’t a requirement. But a few seasons in, producers realized that all that time cast members were spending by the pool or lounging on the couch could be used more wisely. The chats could also be used as a bartering tool: “If you talk shit about Amy on the date, we’ll turn on music and you guys can watch a movie or something,” producer Michael Carroll recalled of one bribe.

  The girl chats bothered Joynt so much that many of her journal entries—some of which she graciously read to me over Skype one night from her New York apartment—focused on her disdain for them.

  “I’m already feeling ready to crack. Give up. Maybe I am even more introverted than I suspected,” she wrote on her third day in the mansion in 2013. “The most painful, draining part of any day are the staged conversations. . . . The smaller conversations with cameras where the girls speculate about dates or recount theirs are nothing short of torture for me. Watching certain girls’ faces contort beyond what seems natural. Splitting into two white grins—every word, every action—because a camera is on them when moments before they seemed relatively normal.”

  Of course, the deepest revelations typically occur during ITMs. Sometimes, participants can be asked to sit for up to five ITMs a day, answering questions about their state of mind and digging into their emotions. I’ll get into the psychology of these sessions in a bit, but a big part of what helps contestants to open up is—ding, ding, ding! You guessed it: alcohol.

  Before discussing the on-set alc, I want to make one thing clear: No one on The Bachelor is forced to drink. There’s no requirement that one must throw back shots or do keg stands to procure a rose.

  But there’s always alcohol on-set. Every kind, and lots of it. It’s a constant, and it is frequently being offered, free of charge. Oftentimes, producers will drink with cast members to make the whole endeavor feel more socially acceptable.

  One field producer told me he still believes he got a job on the franchise only because he was open about his affinity for partying.

  “I think one of the reasons they trusted me with that position is because—I don’t want to say I’m good at drinking, but I hold my alcohol well and I don’t really lose my focus,” said the “party producer,” whom I met for coffee—not drinks. “So it’s like, if I want to have a shot with a contestant, he’ll take a shot with me—or five. You have to build a rapport. Basically, it’s like, ‘Hey, man. We should talk. How are you feeling? You seem a little tense. Let’s take a shot.’ People just keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it and before you know it, things happen.”

  In the mansion, especially, many contestants told me they drank because they were bored. It’s not like you wake up with the intention of getting wasted, but then it’s two p.m., you decide to have a beer by the pool, and if that continues at a steady rate until two a.m., you find yourself drunk.

  “There’s nothing to fucking do,” agreed Carroll, the producer. “If I don’t have a book or TV or a movie to watch and there’s a fridge full of white wine and Champagne and beer and a bar, I’m going to sit by the pool and drink. Duh. And when you go on a date, I’m going to give you a box of Champagne in the limo. Of course! That shit? It makes everything different.”

  Liquor also quells the social anxiety. Imagine being in a new environment with gorgeous people who make you feel insecure, and there are dozens of cameras tracking your every move. Plus, everyone else is drinking. So you feel like you need a glass in your hand to fit in.

  “You’re standing in a room where everyone’s drinking, and there’s definitely not any filtered water there for you to drink,” said Jesse Csincsak, the snowboard instructor who was (briefly) engaged to Bachelorette DeAnna Pappas. “They put something in your hand, it allows you to relax. So are they telling you, ‘Oh, you have to drink’? No, but I can promise you that if you’re acting tense, they’re going to soothe your pain with a couple of shots.”

  It’s not something that most of the producers have ethical misgivings about either. These contestants are adults of legal drinking age.

  “I’m willing to let them do anything any twenty-five- to twenty-eight-year-old would do at a party with mixed company. And look, if things get unsafe, then you step in,” said Scott Jeffress. “One thing that will never happen on my set is, like, a rape or something. I would never allow some guy to walk into the room of some girl who’s passed out. Everyone has to be cognizant of what they’re doing—even when two people get really drunk and want to have sex, if they’re too gone, it’s like, ‘No. Put them to bed.’”

  But after years of only loosely monitoring the on-set drinking, alcohol consumption on the franchise finally spun out of control in the summer of 2017. It happened on Bachelor in Paradise, which had served as the perfect frothy summer filler for ABC when it premiered in 2014. From its inception, the show was more about a good time than fairy-tale romance. It has a tongue-in-cheek tone, even using the love theme from Footloose, Mike Reno and Ann Wilson’s “Almost Paradise,” over the corny opening credits.

  And the show, which typically airs in August, has proved to be a solid ratings draw during an otherwise slow television period. In 2016, the third season’s finale drew roughly 5.6 million viewers—just a tad less than the 5.7 million who tuned in for the season premiere of The Bachelorette the following May.

  But the spin-off’s fate came into question just a few days after filming began on Paradise’s fourth season at the Playa Escondida resort on June 4, 2017. The precipitating event? Corinne Olympios and DeMario Jackson—two contestants who had previously been labeled franchise villains—got drunk and hooked up. According to a source who was on-set, the two quickly got naked in the water and proceeded to engage in what looked like “soft-core porn.” At one point, the source told me, Jackson briefly performed oral sex on Olympios; the two did not have penetrative sex.

  At first, the incident seemed par for the course in Paradise. Contestants regularly get frisky in the open and have sex in bedrooms without doors—though the footage rarely shows anything that raunchy.

  A couple of days later, though, the two contestants were pulled aside and told that two producers had filed third-party complaints with Warner Bros., the production company that produces the ABC show, related to the pool encounter. The entire cast was flown back to the United States. On June 11, Warner Bros. released a statement announcing production had been suspended while it investigated claims of alleged misconduct.

  Olympios hired a high-profile Hollywood lawyer, Marty Singer—who has represented John Travolta and Charlie Sheen—and issued her own statement. “Although I have little memory of that night,” the twenty-four-year-old said, “something bad obviously took place.” Jackson, thirty, retained his own counsel and did a sit-down with E! News claiming the hook-up was consensual.

  On June 20, Warner Bros. announced that its internal investigation did not “support any charge of misconduct” or show that the “safety of any cast member was ever in jeopardy.” Production resumed, but a slew of new rules were instituted: Contestants had to adhere to a two-drink-per-hour maximum, and before initiating sex, they had to check with a producer tasked with making sure both parties were able to give consent.

  Though the show eventually went on to premiere that August—to 5 million viewers, no less—the incident in Mexico disturbed many critics and viewers, raising larger questions about the overall Bachelor franchise, where alcohol has al
ways flowed freely and served as a lubricant for obtaining juicy sound bites and drama.

  “For many years, the Bachelor shows have implemented alcohol as a tool of manipulation to elicit whatever responses they want from contestants,” Jennifer Pozner, a media critic who researched The Bachelor for her 2010 book, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth about Guilty Pleasure TV, told me. “There’s an ever-present need for drama, which is defined on the show as women crying, men fighting, women having catfights, women saying they’re going to die alone. Those conditions they seek are not conducive to the protection of cast members’ safety.”

  Indeed, plenty of contestants have become so intoxicated that they only see the extent of their drunken behavior when it eventually airs on national television. Chad Johnson learned that the hard way during the third season of Paradise, when he began drinking before the cameras even starting rolling on day one. He wasn’t tipsy; he was hammered. By the time production on Bachelor in Paradise kicked off at eleven a.m., he’d already taken seven shots of Jack Daniel’s whiskey and downed a whole bottle of wine.

  Because, he figured: Why not? He’d agreed to go on Paradise because it seemed like a paid vacation, replete with bikini-clad women, a private beach, and an open bar. Also, alcohol loosened him up—he wanted to be liked by his new castmates, and when he drank, he felt like he was instantly funnier.

  “Plus, when you’re filming the show, you have this adrenaline pump of being on TV, so you can drink more and are still capable of walking and talking,” Johnson, age twenty-nine, explained. “There are points of time on the show where you’re still conscious, where in the real world, you would have been asleep somewhere ten hours earlier.”

  But no one on the production team put Johnson to bed. Instead, he passed out on the sand as crabs crawled over his face. The next morning, he learned he engaged in an aggressive make-out session with one female cast member and hurled insults at another who was born with only one full arm. He was also told he’d soiled himself during his sleep.

  Johnson’s behavior that night had consequences: Within hours, Chris Harrison was dispatched to tell him he was no longer welcome on the show. He was asked to pack his bags and return to the States. The move came after Sarah Herron—the contestant Johnson insulted for her disability—gave an ultimatum to production: Either he goes or I go.

  “I ran to the producers and said, morally, I can’t be here and I don’t think we’re setting a good example by keeping him in the house,” Herron recalled. “I thought it was poor form for the franchise to keep someone around that was jeopardizing our safety for ratings’ sake. And producers took it really seriously, because the next morning, Chad was sent home. It felt like a true testament to the fact that they do have our backs.”

  Chris Bukowski doesn’t share that sentiment. When he last turned up on Paradise in 2015, like Johnson, he got blackout drunk—starting off with four vodka sodas before eleven a.m. Though he said he does not remember the experience, he was later told he’d stepped into a fire pit, gotten into a shouting match with a producer, and told a fellow contestant he would hook up with his mom.

  “The day after, not only is the hangover bad, but the consequences—that this is gonna be on TV—are even worse,” he said. “I still take a lot of the blame for the way I was, but I think producers hold responsibility too. They’re the ones supplying the alcohol and the place I’m sleeping and what I’m eating. It’s almost like going to a bar—at the right time, the bar owner is going to cut you off and put you in a cab. And the producers should also cut you off instead of continuing to feed you the juice.”

  Alcohol also helps to fuel the kind of ballsy behavior often needed to catch the eye of the Bachelor or Bachelorette. From the instant contestants walk into the mansion, the competition is under way. Everyone is sizing one another up. Even if you’re considered good-looking in your small Iowa hometown, you’re now surrounded by two dozen other people who are also great catches.

  “It sounds weird for me to say this about other guys, but I’d never seen anyone who looked like these dudes. I was intimidated,” said Brooks Forester, a handsome but decidedly less muscular guy who competed on Desiree Siegfried’s season of The Bachelorette. “I didn’t have a ton of time to get in the greatest shape, so I just kind of went how I tend to carry myself every day. And that wasn’t the case for those guys. One guy took his shirt off and we were like, ‘Jesus! Put your shirt back on!’ There wasn’t a muscle in his body that wasn’t completely shredded.”

  So OK, maybe you’re one of the bros who’s jacked. But you’re a bartender or a “freaking insurance salesman,” like Sean Lowe. And you’re up against racecar drivers, high-powered attorneys, and Ivy League grads.

  “A lot of these guys had some really impressive statistics, and I didn’t have all that much, in my mind,” said Lowe. “I think the competition can play with people’s minds. You just have to really sit by yourself and think, ‘OK, what are my intentions here? Do I want to beat the other guys, or is there something here [with the Bachelorette]?”

  It can be hard to figure out your feelings for the person at the center of the game—er, show—when the competition begins before you’ve even spent five minutes with them. Take night one. You walk out of the limo and meet this eligible Bachelor—an encounter meant to suss out little more than physical attraction. Then, if you’re lucky, you corner him for a couple more minutes in a poolside cabana before another lady steals him for a second. Based on those interactions, the Bachelor will hand out a “first-impression rose” to the woman he’s most taken with.

  And scoring that rose is a game-changer. When Nick Viall received the special bloom from Andi Dorfman on The Bachelorette, he instantly decided he was in it to win it.

  “I went from ‘What the fuck am I doing here? This is ridiculous’ to being the one guy where she’s like, ‘You know what? I like you the best so far,’” he said. “In that little world, it seems silly, but you’re like, ‘Fuck yeah!’ It’s a perfect little prop they have, because whoever gets it, it’s very dangerous.”

  And if you don’t get the first-impression rose, you need to get one at the rose ceremony a few minutes later. Bob Guiney, who went from contestant to Bachelor, does a good job of describing how disorienting this can be in his 2003 book: “I didn’t even know how I felt about being there, or whether I even wanted a rose, until the moment I thought I wasn’t going to get one,” he writes. “Then I knew for sure that I wanted one. It was just that simple principle that something becomes so much more attractive when you suddenly fear you can’t have it.”

  And when the dates come into play? The stakes get even higher. Sure, the outings on the Bach are famously extravagant, featuring horse-drawn carriages, Rodeo Drive shopping sprees, and Broadway-show cameos. But they’re also just a chance for the contestants to get out of the mansion.

  “I think when you are sort of trapped like that, you look forward to even getting out of the house,” said Rozlyn Papa, the villain from Jake Pavelka’s season. “It wasn’t just about Jake. It was about getting to do something exciting. [The producers] come in and announce names and it’s like playing Bingo. We’re like, ‘Those are my numbers! Yay! I’m the winner.’”

  Entire teams are devoted to crafting the dates on The Bachelor. You can’t just go to dinner and then go out dancing. You need to “take a real date and put it on crack,” explained one segment producer who helped shape the franchise’s romantic rendezvous for years. Dinner? Let’s have it on top of a bridge in San Francisco that’s accessible only via helicopter. And when you descend, there’s your favorite country singer putting on a private concert just for you to dance to.

  “If you’re Amy from Oklahoma, here’s what happens,” Michael Carroll posited. “Amy from Oklahoma comes on the show and she’s one of twenty-five chicks. In her head, there’s some weird kismet thing that happens where she feels already—prior to ever showing up—that this g
uy must be for her. ‘I mean, out of all the women in America, I’m one of twenty-five! I’m Amy from Oklahoma! He must be my man.’ So she’s already in it.

  “And then you take her on a date where she flies in a helicopter over the Hollywood Bowl and fucking whoever plays,” he continued. “Then you take her to a rooftop and give her a rose and give her a necklace and ‘ahh.’ It’s a panty dropper.”

  Dozens of date ideas are pitched to executive producers in the weeks leading up to each season—and no date gets approved until the network signs off on it. The team tries to create dates that at least somewhat incorporate the Bachelor’s interests. But the main requirement? That the date’s budget is $0.00.

  That’s right: nada. Yes, there’s a budget allotted for dates—only $20,000 or so for each one—but segment producers often aren’t even told what it is. Instead, their aim is to get everything for free through trade-outs—a sort of barter agreement through which a company offers its goods or services in exchange for the advertising power of The Bachelor.

  To pitch this kind of arrangement, producers reach out to different hotels, airlines, and restaurants and tout the value of having their business appear on ABC prime time. I obtained one letter that a field producer emailed the director of sales and marketing at a Lake Tahoe resort in 2003 in the hopes of filming Jesse Palmer’s season at the hotel. In the note, the producer states her request to shoot a segment for Palmer’s season at the Resort at Squaw Creek, explaining that eight cast members and “incredibly minimal documentary-style camera crews” would be on hand. She outlines how the show’s goal is to put a spotlight on how “luxurious” the resort is, as the premise of The Bachelor is “opulence, luxury, and exclusivity.” “We create and showcase an untouchable ideal man and his lifestyle,” the producer writes. “He lives in a mansion in Southern California and offers the women on the show incredible experiences the average American can only dream about.”