"First of all, yes, I realize I'm a loser for doing this."
That's YouTube user handsomepete, in voice-over, introducing a new two-minute video last month. Thanks to some eagle-eye sleuthing, handsomepete seems to have discovered who wins this season of "The Bachelor" -- no, you won't get a spoiler here -- and he appears to be on point.
If this is viral marketing disinformation, it's self-aware and brilliant. (The clip has remained on YouTube, as of this writing, for three weeks.) And if it's just a guy in a room with a flat-screen TV and a webcam, it still serves a function. With what sounds like an embarrassed shrug, handsomepete closes the clip with empathetic self-loathing: "I've just saved you now from having to watch this horrid TV show."
He seems reasonable and unremarkable enough -- he's got a heavy Canadian accent; from other clips on his YouTube page, he's a fan of the Dave Matthews Band and large whales. And he knows "The Bachelor" is rigorously uncool.
Now in its 13th installment -- 17th if you count the spinoff "The Bachelorette" -- this show has become the slightly embarrassing uncle of reality television. It has, by and large, not changed with the times, though with its particulars -- the bestowing of roses, the preposterous fantasy dates -- it can sometimes seem like the show was conceived in the 1920s, especially up against any number of more modern, and more gauche, dating competitions on other networks. And yet the charms of "The Bachelor" persist. It is pure myth -- no bachelor has yet married the woman he chose on the show -- but no one seems to have told the contestants, who remain some of the most appealingly credulous on all of reality TV.
This time, "The Bachelor's" concession to the times is its star, Jason Mesnick, a 32-year-old single father with a 4-year-old son. He was the last contestant eliminated on the most recent season of "The Bachelorette," even going so far as to drop to one knee in the finale before DeAnna Pappas saved him from himself, and from her, by rejecting him.
"The Bachelor" rarely strays far from anodyne interpretations of handsomeness and flat displays of emotion on the parts of its protagonists. And while there has been a slightly rugged hotness to some of the men, Jason is a throwback to the dweeby anti-swagger of the original, 2002-vintage Bachelor, Alex Michel. When called upon to be dashing, he invariably undermines himself. A couple of weeks ago, when arriving in Las Vegas with Natalie, one of the perkier suitors this season, he said, "I felt as cool as I've ever felt in my life walking into the restaurant with Natalie," and he meant it.
