Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  Though she long felt that the editors on the show were like “the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz,” she actually met the man responsible for the raccoon cut at a wrap party for Paradise.

  “He was like, ‘Just so you know, I’m the one who put the raccoon stuff in there,’” she said. “I was literally like, ‘Really? You’re owning up to that? Do you know how much grief you caused in my life from people actually thinking I was talking to raccoons?’”

  Which, yes. It’s probably not fun to have people thinking your BFF is a raccoon. But Bachelor edits have had far more serious repercussions. Flajnik, for one, still blames the editors on his season for the demise of his relationship with the so-called villainous Robertson. While he came off looking fine—“They’re never gonna make the main person look bad, right? You’re the knight in shining armor”—he feels the show went to extreme lengths to make his onetime-fiancée appear evil.

  “You do all this work for everyone for so long and it’s like, ‘This is the end product you decided to display to the entire world?’” said Flajnik. “I felt super emasculated. It was like, ‘God, that’s not really how I remember it, but that’s how everyone else is gonna see it, and that sucks, because that’s not who I really am.’

  “I’m not saying I want to be in a relationship with Courtney,” he clarified, “but I blame the higher-ups in production for the way they handled and portrayed our relationship. And that’s why Mike Fleiss and all of them don’t reach out to me. They know I don’t want anything to do with the franchise.”

  Robertson declined my interview request, but in her 2014 book, I Didn’t Come Here to Make Friends: Confessions of a Reality Show Villain, she talks about how producers relished her over-the-top antics. A few weeks into filming, she wrote, the team already recognized she was a “loose cannon, especially after a glass of wine.”

  “As time went on, and as it became clear that Ben liked me and I’d be sticking around for a while, I got pulled into confessionals and found myself trying to be a comedian on-camera, doling out increasingly outrageous insults,” she wrote.

  That’s the interesting thing about contestants who end up fulfilling specific Bachelor character types—the villain, the drunk, the virgin, the Southern Belle, the aspiring musician—a lot of them cop to their part in the creation of those roles.

  Remember Erica Rose, the tiara-wearing wannabe princess whose daddy was a plastic surgeon? Even though she knew she’d come off looking like a spoiled brat by wearing tiara headbands, she decided that going along with the producers’ costume suggestion was a better idea than ignoring it.

  “If you don’t go along with them, they’re going to portray you that way anyways, so essentially, I just allowed it,” she said with a shrug. “When we were moving into the mansion, they told me to go up to Chris Harrison and complain about the fact that there weren’t any maids. At first I didn’t want to, but then I realized it would be funny. I feel like I was in on everything, so I didn’t feel exploited in any way.”

  Same thing for Justin “Rated R” Rego, the former wrestler who left Ali Fedotowsky’s season after it came to light he was making phone calls to an ex back in Canada. (No surprise here: He was a villain.) Even though Rego hadn’t wrestled professionally for more than two years when he applied to be on The Bachelorette—in fact, he was the assistant manager at a fitness club—he still threw his alter ego’s name on the form to spice up the otherwise “vanilla” application.

  On his first night in the mansion, Rego said, producers asked if he’d put his “Rated R” T-shirt on under his dress shirt. As soon as he exposed it to Fedotowsky, he became enemy number one in the house—the guy who looked like he was just on the show to advance his career. So later that evening, when Harrison asked the cast to vote for the contestant who was “here for the wrong reasons,” Rego won out.

  “That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, I’m that guy this season,’” he said. “I was blown away that everything was going to come down on me. So it was like, ‘If this is how the storyline is going to be, I’m going to make this a damn good storyline. Let’s do it.’”

  So in ITMs, when producers would ask him to answer a question as if he were his bombastic Rated R character, he went with it. One day, he said, Gale asked if he’d be interested in spending a little extra time with Fedotowsky: “Let’s say we let you leave the house and you walk to her house. Is that something you’d be open to?” Even though he was on crutches at the time—which would obviously make walking a challenge—Rego responded that it would be “dope” to see more of the Bachelorette. So Gale revealed his plan.

  While Fedotowsky’s residence was just up the street, Rego was driven forty-five minutes away to a curvy, cliffside road. There, he was told to get out and hobble down the street on his crutches as the cameras rolled. The scene would later be used to make it look like Rego had gone to extreme lengths to see his love interest. But in fact, he was just chauffeured over to her place later in the day.

  “I know the importance of a storyline,” he said, explaining why he went along with the scheme. “There were some nice, great human beings on that show. You, the viewer, never saw them. If I’m going to be on a show like that and get that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I’m going to make the best of it.

  “With the producers, you can either cooperate with them and stay on the show and have all these great things happen and have these stories sixty years later to tell my kids,” he said, “or you can not cooperate and be like, ‘No, I don’t want to say that. I don’t want to do this.’ And then it’s like, ‘OK, we’re not going to film you, and you’re going to get eliminated.’”

  The most brusque producers will admit as much too. They don’t follow a handbook of moral guidelines. As far as they’re concerned, once a cast member signs on the dotted line, anything is fair game.

  “Look, I don’t want to see anybody get hurt,” said Scott Jeffress. “But I do want to make good television, and if somebody’s feelings are hurt, I’m sorry. You signed up for it. I’m very adamant about having cast embrace the show that is shown on television. In other words: Look, you may have said this a little differently than what it appears to be in the cut, but that’s what the viewer heard, so embrace it. Own it. This is you. I don’t put up with a lot of cast members saying producers made me do this or that. I’ll get on the phone, call them up and say, ‘They didn’t make you say anything. We asked a question and you answered it, OK?’”

  Jeffress, who now works as an EP on MTV’s dating show Are You the One?, says everyone in the reality television industry is constantly trying to push the boundaries. And with every year that passes, contestants become more willing to expose their minds and bodies.

  “I mean, look where we are. I’ve got people having sex on-camera. I can’t show it, but they’re having it,” he said. “If it was legal to put electrocutions on TV, they’d be doing it if it garnered ratings and if advertisers would sponsor it. That’s really where the moral standard lies—with the advertisers. They’ll pull sponsorship from a show that they think goes too far. But advertisers are flocking to The Bachelor.”

  Why I’m a Fan

  PAUL SCHEER

  I’m a latecomer to the Bachelor game. I would say Ben Flajnik was kind of my entry-point season, when I began loving the show, because he was a terrible Bachelor. I used to think with guys like Andrew Firestone: “Oh, yeah. That guy looks cool.” And now it seems like they’re like, “Fuck it! Let’s just have fun with these dummies!” No offense to anybody, but one of the Bachelors lived at home with his parents. That’s not the prize you want to put on TV. None of these people are prime husband material anymore.

  There’s a voyeuristic quality to the show that is so fun. You go, “Oh my gosh, what would it be like if I was in that situation? Why are they reacting like that? Why are they doing this?” You’re constantly putting yourself in their position, which makes it, in a weird way,
aspirational. We have all dated. It’s the only thing that we can all do equally—that we’re all experts in. I’m not an expert on how to build a fire or a hut on Survivor. I can’t sing or tell you if someone is off-pitch. But I can tell you, “Oh, that girl’s going to be trouble,” or “That guy’s a dick.”

  I think that there’s always a turned-up nose at the franchise because if you haven’t watched it, you have an assumption of what it is. On Howard Stern’s show, they give him so much crap for being a fan. The listeners call about it and they complain about it. But whenever someone makes fun of people watching The Bachelor, I’m like, “Well, you haven’t watched it, then, because I used to feel the same exact way.” I’ve been with my wife now for thirteen years, so I’m so far out of the dating pool it’s ridiculous. And it’s funny to see the current dating world vicariously and talk about it together. We argue about who the best person on the show is—she’ll shoot down who I like, and vice versa. And then it’s like, “Well, wait. If you don’t like that person on the show, why do you like me?”

  You can’t just dip your toe in. It will take me like six months to get through an hour-long drama that I have all lined up, but I can watch a Sunday-to-Monday night of The Bachelor and it’s like cotton candy. You eat it. It’s delicious. It disappears. Where did that go? I can’t believe I watched four hours of it.

  I think it’s the best-produced reality show on television, hands down. They’ve been doing the same thing over and over again, essentially, for [thirty-five] seasons. But you’re always invested. It may get predictable, but that predictability doesn’t make it boring.

  —Paul Scheer, comedian (The League, Veep)

  CHAPTER 8

  Under the Covers

  After Clare Crawley’s father died, she started to feel anxious all the time. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving her house. The thought of driving on the freeway made her jittery. And getting on a plane? She wouldn’t even consider it.

  So signing up for The Bachelor represented more than just taking a shot at love. Going on the show meant she was trying to conquer her anxiety, ridding herself of her fears by facing them head on.

  Still, before she flew from Sacramento down to Los Angeles to meet Juan Pablo Galavis, her sister gave her one Xanax pill, folded up in a tissue. “Keep this in your pocket, and if you ever get in a situation where you start to panic, you’ll be OK,” Crawley’s sibling advised.

  But she never ended up swallowing the pill.

  Because once she got on the show, her nerves started to dissipate. By the time production traveled to Vietnam, Crawley was astounded at how far she’d come. “I started sobbing, because I was like, ‘I wish my dad could see me here. I wish he could see me without anxiety and know what I’m feeling—the most free feeling in the entire world.’”

  To commemorate the moment, she decided to ask the producers if she could go for a late-night swim in the ocean. It was well after midnight, and she wasn’t supposed to leave her hotel room.

  “Absolutely,” she said they responded, “but Juan Pablo’s the reason that you’re here, so do you want to share that moment with him?”

  She liked the idea, so she and a camera crew wandered over to the Bachelor’s room around four a.m. Despite the hour, he was game for an adventure. The two ran down to the beach and hopped in the water. Crawley said she was crying, and he hugged her, saying how happy he was to be able to share the moment with her. Then they went to bed, separately.

  But when the ocean encounter played out on television, it appeared far more scandalous. There was lots of kissing, and it looked as if the couple potentially had sex in the water.

  “I felt like I was kicked in the stomach, because that had been one of the best, greatest feelings in my entire life—feeling that sense of relief from anxiety,” Crawley said of watching the episode. “I felt so betrayed by the producers. You put [in] slow motion, sexy music, muffled sound, and it seems like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’ Nobody gives two shits about somebody overcoming anxiety. I think that’s so much more relatable, but of course they have to make it look like drama.”

  Things only got worse from there. Shortly after the late-night swim, Galavis confessed to Crawley that he felt guilty about their ocean dip. “That was good, but at the same time, it was kind of a little weird for me,” he told her in his thick Venezuelan accent. “To me, it’s hard, this whole situation, because I have a daughter. I don’t want her to see what happened. If she sees it, I don’t think it will be that nice.”

  Taken aback, Crawley started crying, saying she hadn’t intended to “disrespect” his daughter. Not only, according to her, had nothing sexual occurred between her and the Bachelor—but Galavis hadn’t hesitated to go to the beach with her. And now, after the fact, he was trying to make it seem like she’d lured him into some scandalous trap?

  “In any other position, I would have looked at him and been like, ‘First of all, there was nothing wrong with what happened,’” she said. “I was trying to look at it from his perspective, like, ‘OK, maybe he did feel bad.’ But now I look back on it and I’m going, ‘Hey, bro, you could have said no.’ I was so crushed, because he had essentially taken that moment away from me.”

  The incident marked a watershed moment on The Bachelor—one of the first times two cast members appeared to have sex prior to the Fantasy Suite. Since the program’s origin, sex has typically been reserved for the Fantasy Suite—rose-laden luxury hotel rooms that the final three contestants get to spend the night in—separately—if they so choose. The special evenings take place after hometown dates but before anyone gets down on a knee, therefore becoming the last opportunity for the finalists to sleep together before getting engaged.

  The Fantasy Suite dates don’t actually occur over three consecutive nights—there’s a day filled with interviews in between each romantic night. But in theory, the Bachelor or Bachelorette could still be having sex with three different people in the span of a week. A situation that wouldn’t fly with most fledgling couples outside of the Bach.

  “I was like, ‘Uh, could I have set something up like this in college where I could date twenty-seven girls and they’re all cool with it?’” said Lorenzo Borghese, the Italian prince who was the ninth Bachelor. “It’s kind of like watching boxing, where you see a guy getting beaten in the head but you’re cheering. If the guy were out here on the street, you’d try to break it up. But when it’s treated like, ‘Hey, this is the game,’ you accept it.”

  Early on, however, producers weren’t sure how accepting contestants would be of the Fantasy Suites. Women in particular struggled to compartmentalize the idea that the Bachelor had just been intimate with another woman, said Scott Jeffress.

  “Women really felt like it was creepy and weird,” the producer recalled. “So you just have to say, ‘Look, this is just the way the show works. It’s not his fault. Are you feeling it? Do you feel like you’re ready to go to that level yet? Because now’s your chance—just saying.’ And once they get on the date with him, it all goes away. It’s their world and there’s no one else there.”

  “There was more resistance in the beginning, and then it lessened,” agreed Michael Carroll. “Girls just got more understanding of what it is. If you come and you’re final three and you want to lock it down, there you go.”

  Of course, there are no explicit rules forbidding anyone from sleeping together earlier in the season. But if you have sex before the designated time and outside of the designated place, there’s a good chance you’ll be treated like Crawley was.

  “If Clare had bided her time and waited however many episodes until Juan Pablo invited her into his Fantasy Suite,” wrote Slate’s television critic Willa Paskin, “she would have been celebrated as a woman willing to make herself vulnerable for love. Instead, she got the easy-woman edit and a scolding about sexual propriety from a guy proudly wearing multiple women’s spit. It may be ha
rd out here for a pimp, but it’s way harder for a bachelorette.”

  That was especially evident when Kaitlyn Bristowe had her turn as the leading lady in 2015. Early on, Bristowe made it clear she was a rule-breaker when she let Nick Viall join the cast of men competing for her affection. Viall had just come off Andi Dorfman’s Bachelorette, and after he was sent home as the runner-up, he and Bristowe struck up a flirty friendship. They exchanged messages online and spoke on the phone, and when Bristowe was selected as the Bachelorette, Viall decided to throw caution to the wind and turn up on the show again—and she allowed him to stay.

  Viall’s late arrival instantly stirred up controversy. The other men were displeased that someone Bristowe had a prior relationship with had been allowed on the show at the last minute. And to make matters worse, she seemed insanely attracted to him.

  “We’d spent five weeks doing nothing but talking to each other beforehand,” Viall later explained to me. “The physical part was playing catch-up to the emotional. . . . There’s a reason why we looked like we wanted to rip each other’s clothes off: because we fucking did.”

  Which explains why, after a one-on-one date in Dublin that consisted almost entirely of making out, Bristowe asked Viall to spend the night at her hotel. Though viewers only saw a closed bedroom door, revealing subtitles (Viall: “I want to know every part of you” #shudder), and heard moaning, which made it obvious what was going down.

  But the next day, instead of celebrating her sexual escapade, Bristowe looked forlorn. She still had half a dozen men left in the competition, and she felt things “went too far with Nick.”

  “And it’s not about me feeling bad that I was intimate with him,” she insisted in an ITM. “I feel bad that I have relationships with these other guys that are so great and mean so much to me.”