Man Tears as Entertainment
Why I can’t look away
In 2016, I started watching The Bachelor franchise. Up until then, I’d only watched a couple of seasons of Survivor and had deliberately avoided all other reality TV shows, uninterested in supporting an arm of the entertainment industry that stirs up emotionally scarring drama for the sake of “good TV,” treats its stars like puppets, and profits from portraying problematic hetero dynamics and unrealistic beauty standards.
But then my best friend’s brother died, and in the painful months that followed, I began watching The Bachelor because I knew she was watching The Bachelor. We were living in different cities at the time, but we would text each other about the season’s petty dramas and vapid conversations (it was Nick Viall’s season), and the show became a way for us to connect through the hardest period of my friend’s life. Before long, I was hosting Bachelor-viewing nights with a local coven of women. Because Trump was president, we would throw popcorn at the TV and shout about how the show represented everything wrong with America. Eventually, I was initiated into a Bachelor gossip group text thread with some friends. At work, a sizeable contingent of my coworkers started an email thread devoted to The Bachelor. In each of these cases, we admitted our viewership made us complicit in supporting a fundamentally troubling franchise, yet we couldn’t look away.