The Bachelor/The Bachelorette

Although the television airwaves are filled with reality TV shows that show the various facets of dating, none have managed to maintain its popularity in quiet the same way as ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette series.  Whereas many dating reality TV shows have either a warped premise involved like Joe Millionaire (the story of a man that pretends to be a millionaire who tries to find true love and then sees if true love will endure his lie) or Temptation Island (four couples are separated between sexes and then spend weeks hanging out with sexy members of the opposite sex that try to break up their relationship), The Bachelor and The Bachelorette is the classy dating reality television show.

After numerous incarnations, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are now reality TV institutions.  A fascinating look at how to find love through appearing on TV, The Bachelor posts one attractive and accomplished bachelor alone with twenty-five women that want to find love.  Throughout the course of the show, the women live together in a villa while The Bachelor does his thing living in a fantastic house. Over the course of the show, The Bachelor gets to know each of the women through such things as group dates and, after some time, individual dates.  At the end of each episode, The Bachelor has to eliminate some women from the contest.  Each episode ends with the dismissed women pondering why this occurred and ends with a final shot of The Bachelor and the remaining contests awkwardly getting back to things.

Finally, by the last couple episodes of the show, viewers will have a good insight into the remaining contestants.  Individual dates are made and tensions rise as the women vie for The Bachelor’s attention.  The Bachelor takes the last few contestants to meet his family and will also go to visit the remaining contestant’s hometown to experience what their life is like.  After assessing all of this detail, The Bachelor then chooses one winner and theoretically proposes to the winner.  Considering that only one successful marriage has come out of The Bachelor, the happy ending of each edition of this successful show is a bit tarnished but hey that’s for a reality that isn’t shown on television.

The Bachelor has managed to endure its many years as a reality TV staple by finding different methods of innovation.  After the first edition of The Bachelor, ABC decided to build the next edition with the last woman remaining that wasn’t chosen as its centerpiece.  The Bachelorette reversed the genre roles and for a long period of time that was how each new bachelor or bachelorette was chosen.

However, after awhile it became apparent that being the runner-up on this show had far more advantages than actually being chosen by the contestant.  Given a choice between having a reality TV show where twenty members of the opposite sex fight over you or dating some person that you met on a reality TV show, it is easy to see why ABC decided to try to find new ways to innovate the show.

Recently, The Bachelor has introduced different twists like the edition of The Bachelor revolving around New York Giants third-string quarterback and Canadian icon, Jesse Palmer.  The last edition of The Bachelorette revolved around the woman that was chosen in the first version of The Bachelor after her marriage with the original Bachelor ended in disaster.  The current version of The Bachelor allowed the women to first choose between two bachelors and after the bachelor was chosen, he got to immediately eliminate ten women.  Oh good times as always with The Bachelor.