I’ve been indulging in a surfeit of ridiculously inane TV for the past week and this one, with the knowlege that it’s probably the last time (for six months) that I’ll be able to do so. With this in mind, I DVR’ed the two-hour premiere of the new Bachelor in Rome show, though I won’t be able to follow it through the season, except in snarky recaps.
After four attempts at it, I finally managed to watch the whole thing, and came out of it this evening feeling vaguely disturbed. Oh, I know the whole thing is a sham, and you can tell that “the producers” (whoever that shadowy group of people pulling the strings may be) encourage the eponymous bachelors to keep/dispose of certain bachelorettes on their show . . . And yes, there is the fact that they generally break up as soon as the show is ended. I guess that, just as with any well-established “reality television” tradition, the show tends to pull from a pool of willing participants who all seem to have something in common. Usually they’re player-types who are ready and willing to have their 15 minutes in the spotlight, and self-absorbed enough to just think about how they’re coming across, not about how their actions affect the people around them. And I speak of the men AND the women who’ve been on the show, whether as the “bachelor/ette” or as the 25 possible picks for the main character. And honestly, I’m used to seeing either slightly sleazy player-types enjoy kissing all those girls or lots of dumb-as-doorknobs people talk themselves into “falling in love” with one another because it makes for good TV. Hey, I know about talking yourself into falling in love . . . been there, done that!
Anyway, the point is, when it’s this particular pattern I don’t feel too bad about watching the show. There’s a sense that the people involved either deserve the inevitable hurt that they’ll get or that they’re really too stupid and/or self-involved to be hurt as badly as a normal person would be, thrust into that exact situation. However, this premiere felt . . . off, somehow.
The Bachelor this time is someone who’s a for-real prince, one of the Italian nobility (any reader of Henry James or Edith Wharton, et al. knows that princes on the continent are about as easy to find as lords in England), but a branch of the family that’s made it in the U.S. From what I can tell, he reads as a nice guy brought up in a well-to-do family: privileged, but not too different than some people I encountered in college. But the point is: he really does seem like a nice guy. Oh, have no fear, I’m sure that the inevitable outcome of having dozens of girls swarming around him eager for his attention will emerge–he’ll become slightly conceited about it and feel increasingly less concerned about how he’s hurting the silly dingbats who’ve decided that they love him “just like a fairy tale” . . . But in this premiere, there was something appealingly genuine about him. He had a sense of self-deprecating humor about being set into a “family” castle that really had nothing to do with his own life, and that he was being set up as a “Prince Charming” when nothing could be less like the truth.
Doubtless the guy gets plenty of attention from women in his daily life–he’s heir to his family’s cosmetics company, after all, as well as having that ever-compelling Continental title to throw around and impress others. However, watching him meet each of the 25 women as they came in, and make stumbling and nervous conversation with each of them, and then seeing him keep remarking on how it must be every guy’s dream to end up in a situation where there were 25 (or 27, eventually) women who all were desiring only to be with him . . . I don’t know–at least for this episode, he seemed slightly like a real person to me. And most of those Bachelors don’t.
I thought as I watched it that he seemed like he might be, in daily life, a little bit shy, and that this situation is going to be taking him far too much out of his element to be able to cope well. It seems that my impression may be correct . . . in their teaser about the rest of the season they included a snippet of him with chin/lower lip trembling as tears streaked his face, no doubt in realization that he was going to have to hurt someone by kicking her off after letting her think that he really liked her.
I guess I feel bad that we put people in this position, in our voyeuristic hunger for “good TV”. I don’t think anyone that I know would do well in a contrived situation like the Bachelor. When you’re looking to fall in love, it’s quite easy to do so. And when you’re involved in highly emotional settings with lots of different people (from the perspective of the main character of the series), I don’t doubt that you feel that you’re in love with each of them–for the time that you spend with them. We don’t get into positions like this in daily life precisely because we’re not made to sort people out that way–it doesn’t work well. The people who date lots of people at the same time are usually players who like it that way–and they’re reprehensible sorts who deserve a lot more heartache than they seem to get out of it.
Oh well. I was trying to think where I was going with this and I find that I’m unsure. Consider it just a set of impressions about something that struck me today. And yes, it’s a form of mental procrastination from the ever-more-pressing realities of getting everything together for leaving the country.
