A Guilty Pleasure

True confession: I've been watching "The Bachelor" on Monday nights. In a short-term, completely inconsequential way, I'm hooked, and apparently I'm not the only one. According to the New York Times, the current edition, featuring single dad Jason Mesnick as the bachelor, is drawing the show's biggest audience in five years. How about that? What is it about this show?

I watched the The Bachelor when it first came on, back in 2002, and stayed with it through the first 3 bachelors (Alex, Aaron and Andrew) and the first bachelorette (Trista). When Trista's season got down to the last episode, her final two potential husbands were Charlie and Ryan, and as I watched I was certain that she would pick Charlie. It seemed obvious that her attraction to Charlie was so much stronger than her attraction to Ryan. I kept reminding myself that what we see is very carefully edited to create suspense and mystery about the outcome until the big reveal in the final show, but it didn't matter. Charlie was a hunk and I wanted him to win. I was sure he would win.

As everyone who follows reality television knows, Trista picked Ryan, and boy was I mad about that. I even called a friend and left her a rather over-the-top message about how lame the outcome was, how stupid the show was, how manipulated I felt, etc. Then I took a good look at myself and said, "girl, get a life". That's way more emotionally invested in a television show, reality or otherwise, than I want to be. So I stopped watching.

I wish I had a deeply profound reason for why I started watching again in January, but I don't. It's just kind of fun, in the middle of a cold Chicago winter, to plunk myself down on my couch every Monday night to watch two hours worth of romantic mayhem and melodrama as it unfolds on television. Did you notice I said two hours? As I recall, Bachelor pioneers like Aaron and Andrew only got one hour a week, but apparently the ratings are so good for Jason that ABC has expanded each episode to two hours. Of course, that doesn't mean there's an extra hour's worth of actual story. The extra time seems to be mostly reviews of last week and previews of next week, interrupted frequently by lots and lots of commercials. But who am I to complain? As I said, I'm watching.