A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

BUT I, SAID THE BACHELOR TO HIS BRIDE, AM NOT WAITING FOR TONIGHT: Allow me, please, a few words about Bachelor Pad. I don't pretend to be an expert, since I get only about 45 minutes (or 37.5%) of it a week, which may or may not be 62.5% less than certain other people who will not admit to watching this in my bed. But in any event, this show, I think, is both a stroke of cruel genius and a self-inflicted wound.

Genius, because this show employs a particularly knowing kind of meta. The Bachelor is a game show earnestly pretending to be a dating show, slavishly recreating in soft focus the Treasured Memories milestones of everyromance (the Walk on the Beach; the Fun Date; Meet the Parents; Sex Date) while slyly supercharging the romantic buy-in with the aphrodisiac high of watching competitors get picked off, ten-little-Indians-style. Bachelor Pad, by contrast, is almost exactly the same show, except that nobody has to pretend that the dating elements are real. Mike Fleiss and company have really pulled something off here. Imagine if there were a television show where former contestants on Family Feud played the Family Feud board game. It's kind of like that, except with fake boobs and night-vision sex. That Fleiss can get people to watch that -- genius.

But it's a self-inflicted wound, too, because Fleiss and Chris Harrison seem determined to expose the lie of the Original Recipe. Viewers could tell themselves that Bachelor contestants were looking for love in an unconventional way, but Bachelor Pad tells those viewers that, no, those were just horrible people desperate for a way to get on TV but too old for The Real World. And the second look that these people get is not flattering. Twenty-five bachelorettes mooned over Jake Pavelka, but his second lap shows him to be a jaw-grinding pillar of brittle tension, all of the water in his body having been replaced by vitriol for his former girlfriend, Vienna. And Vienna, whose own appeal appears proven to have resided improbably in the eight inches of hair that she later cut off, is stuck in a discomforting relationship with a manipulative Spencer Pratt imitator to whom she has to apologize for not despising Jake conspicuously enough. These are Jake and Vienna, the heroes of our great romantic journey of a year or two ago? It's no wonder that Chris Harrison cannot even be bothered to soften his contempt for these people. This show may have been hatched of a bet in which Fleiss had to disprove the theory that if Bachelorette Ashley and two seasons of Bachelor Brad could not kill the Bachelor brand, nothing could.