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In mid-May, Network Ten officially announced The Bachelor Australia had been axed after a disastrous 11th season that premiered to its lowest audience ever, with just 319,000 viewers tuning in to see Ben, Luke and Wesley hand out what would be the final thorny roses. (Perhaps the only person to truly see what was coming was Brea, who wisely dumped Wesley in the final episode.)
It was, at its heart, a reality show made for a simpler, better time. One in which we naively thought love could be found on TV, where shoving 24 women into a mansion in Sydney’s Hills District and depriving them of any gainful activity other than fighting for the affection of a bloke and unfettered access to a cheese platter was OK.
It also, for a few short seasons, gave the ladies a go – not just with The Bachelorette Australia (officially axed in 2022), but by introducing same-sex options into the mix and featuring an Indigenous woman, Brooke Blurton.
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It also had a reasonable success rate compared with its competitors: season one lovers Tim Robards and Anna Heinrich are still together, as are season three’s Sam Wood and Snezana Markoski, season six’s Matty Johnson and Laura Byrne, season eight’s Locky Gilbert and Irena Srbinovska, and season nine’s Jimmy Nicholson and Holly Kingston. (Interesting to note that the success rate dropped to zero once they turned it into a three-Bachelors-for- the-price-of-one gimmick.)
And that’s why I will mourn it. Not for host Osher Gunsberg’s outlandish suits and outrageous pauses, but for what we, as a reality-TV-watching nation, have become. We’re hooked on straight, toxic drama and the displeasures of the flesh. We have normalised gaslighting on prime-time television and turned cheating into a car-crash sport. We don’t want love – we want to be entertained.
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Yes, the major offender is Nine’s Married at First Sight (MAFS) – which continues to rate its socks off, with this year’s final apparently pulling more than 2 million viewers – but it’s not the only one. Love Island Australia (also on Nine, the owner of this masthead) and FBoy Island on Binge sing from the same scandal sheet, while Seven’s country cousin Farmer Wants a Wife, which does have a reasonably successful rate of engineering genuine matches, has added a terse dinner party to the mix.
We have become so good at producing toxic television that overseas audiences have noticed. British singers Adele and Sam Smith have raved about MAFS, with the show’s sixth season becoming the top-ranked series on Channel 4’s streaming service All 4.
In the US, it’s an entirely different story. While our MAFS has been a viral hit, The Bachelor has just been renewed for its 29th season, after what Vulture called its most “unabashedly romantic proposal in years”. Meanwhile, The Bachelorette starts its 21st season in July, while recent spin-offs The Golden Bachelor and The Golden Bachelorette feature contestants in their 70s (but as is the way with US reality TV, they all pass for 50).
So what’s going on? On pure numbers, it’s population, obviously. The US just has a broader pool of talent to choose from. The slightly sensible contestants will lean towards The Bachelor, those with literally something to hide will try Netflix’s Love is Blind, while the desperate will go for Netflix’s other option Sexy Beasts. (The absolute fame-hungry, meanwhile, will try their luck on any number of Housewives franchises or real estate shows, where fame and money are the real aphrodisiacs.)
The US is also a permanently optimistic nation – land of the brave and all that – whereas we are forever scrappy convicts, colonialists or migrants. We’re a nation that has long been suspicious of the other kind and prefers our tall poppies cut down.
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We don’t want true love, we want people to get what we feel they deserve – humiliation on national TV, births, deaths and marriages (and then, hopefully, a split) announced in New Idea and then a deal to sell Napisan on TV.
And that feels mean, icky and fake. I am not a romantic person – ask my husband – but I have not given up on romance on TV. The Bachelor may be dead, but at least it stood for true love (just don’t mention the group dates), and surely that is worth fighting for. Just ask William Shakespeare.
* Nine is the owner of this masthead.
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