Charmed Silly

Well, excuse me for coming late to the party, but it took “The Bachelor” to seduce me. Until Alex Michel, the highly eligible, soul mate-shopper of ABC’s hit “reality” show came along, I was a confirmed hater of the unscripted programs that surfaced on television a few seasons ago.

Without ever having seen “Survivor,” I decided it was stupid, contrived and boring. When “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” was on at the gym, I’d leave the room. I feared that those relentlessly hyped phenomena and their sorry offspring would elbow out the unreal series I enjoy: well-crafted fare like “The West Wing” and “Six Feet Under.”

I wish I could say I would have spent this spring’s Monday evenings rereading the complete works of Virginia Woolf if I hadn’t been flattened by a nasty bout of pneumonia. But, if truth be told, I didn’t tune into “The Bachelor” just because I was weak and feverish. About halfway through its six-week run, in which 31-year-old Michel fishes for Mrs. Right in a pool of 25 carefully selected women, I began hearing murmurs from smart, sophisticated, highly evolved female friends. “I know it’s sexist and ridiculous, but I’m addicted to ‘The Bachelor,’” they confessed.

So I watched Episode 4. Ensconced in a Malibu mansion that is to the new millennium what the “Dynasty” homestead was to the ‘80s, Michel had winnowed the group down to a quartet of beauties. In a hometown-hopping hour, he met each of their families. Then, in the show’s final minutes, one of the hopefuls was eliminated. Oh, my God, I thought. This is stupid, contrived and often slow enough to be boring. I was addicted too.

The scholarly component of my fascination stemmed from analyzing how cleverly a drama was constructed from the basic one-man, 25-women premise. “The Bachelor” (and for all I know, its unscripted predecessors) is a triumph of clever editing. The most romantic, amusing or titillating moments from hours of undoubtedly tedious encounters are shown. I write nonfiction for a living. Why wouldn’t I be transfixed by the show’s skill at spinning a compelling narrative from the dross of life? Part of the fun is busting the essential manipulativeness of the format.

For example, Michel has a wonderful time with Trista’s family in St. Louis. They’re warm and welcoming. Talk flows, laughs come easily. When he meets Shannon’s parents in Dallas, the atmosphere is so chilly it’s a wonder he didn’t put on a parka. Were the good times in Texas edited out? Were the conversational dead ends in Missouri trashed? Call me cynical, but I think so.

In a “reality” show, reality is plastic. The players’ appeal, their vulnerability and even wit can be adjusted as deliberately as a TV set’s volume control. Michel would have been insufferable if he’d been too perfect. Thus the decision to show him losing his lunch, as he and Trista hover above Hawaii in a helicopter, only made him more endearing.

Enough intellectual rationalization. There’s much more to a “Bachelor” fixation than a desire to bust the show for being faux. Millions of women, and some men, have become obsessed with the program, whose audience and media presence steadily grew. As Diane Sawyer said on “Good Morning America” after admitting she’d fallen under “The Bachelor’s” spell, “It’s a strange thing we’re all doing when we watch, but we are watching.” Inquiring minds wonder why.

Everyone’s a voyeur. With the exception of Monica Lewinsky and her married boyfriend, we don’t usually become privy to what goes on between men and women behind closed doors. But we are curious. “The Bachelor” is part of a genre that finds sport in the brutality of modern courtship. It’s less cheesy than “Blind Date,” “Shipmates,” “Temptation Island” or “Change of Heart.” Michel is a poised, personable management consultant with an MBA from Stanford. The show’s bevy of bachelorettes is uncommonly telegenic, outgoing and seems to have triple-digit IQs. “The Bachelor” lets us see the sort of genetically blessed population you’d think would be immune to the more barbaric aspects of singlehood being humiliated. There’s a certain wicked comfort in knowing no one is safe from the dating jungle’s hazards.

Shallow is good. We come to know the characters we care about in dramatic series over time. We know their back stories and idiosyncrasies. If “The Bachelor” moved at a more leisurely pace, it would have more depth. Yet its effectiveness is in direct proportion to its shallowness. Its cast is reduced to archetypes. Michel is the catch, choosing among the good girl, the ditz, the hottie, the mystery woman and the neurotic handful. By skimming the surface, the show lets the audience fill in its many blanks, sparking the sort of debate that fueled its popularity.

Pass the popcorn. Let us not underestimate the howl factor. It’s so easy to mock Michel and the girls for their verbal tics, hairstyle goofs or awkward giggles. Nothing like sitting in front of the TV feeling superior to cap off a hard day.

Take this cringe-inducing exchange: As they ride home from a date in one of the show’s ubiquitous stretch limos, Michel asks Kim, a nanny from Arizona, what she likes to do in her free time. She tells him she finds turning the pages of magazines relaxing, but she doesn’t really “read fiction/nonfiction.” The very thought that a guy who majored in history and literature at Harvard might stroll into the sunset with a gal who confines her reading to Us magazine and self-help tomes makes you screech at the screen.

Women have organized “The Bachelor”-watching parties, because the urge to nudge a friend while cackling is often irresistible. Most of the time, everyone involved seems in on the joke. On a pre-show broadcast just before Thursday’s finale, it was evident that the producers and most of the participants have a sense of humor about themselves.

Champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Perhaps “The Bachelor” hooked me when “Survivor” and “The Mole” didn’t because romance is more entertaining than power struggles. The show has put Michel and his inamoratas into soft-focus fantasies sure to warm the heart of every woman who believed the glass slippers didn’t give Cinderella blisters.

At every turn, Michel and the woman he’s with are pampered. The dazzling settings they find themselves in obscure the fact that nothing that might pass for interesting conversation ever occurs. In the snippets we see, the dates have all the charm of job interviews, as Michel grills the women about everything from the authenticity of their body parts to whether they expect relationships to follow a preordained sexual timetable. Michel may sound platitudinous when he tells each woman she’s “awesome,” but style trumps content. It can be hard to quibble with such a pretty fairy tale.

Repeat Steps 1 through 4. There’s a notion currently rampant in the culture that the right way to find a mate can be diagramed the way Popular Mechanics teaches you how to install a carburetor. Some women are looking for tips, as if whatever wiles “The Bachelor” winner used could be practiced at home. For them, “The Bachelor” is the “Name That Tune” of relationship shows--”I can get that man to propose in six dates!”

If the mysteries of attraction could be reduced to a strategy, everyone would follow it. If there were a love potion, everyone would drink it. Just because Michel ultimately chose the bustiest, most blandly agreeable and sexually adventurous woman who, he said, “made him feel good,” doesn’t mean there aren’t terrific single men looking for flat-chested, high-maintenance brunets who’ll make them miserable. Just don’t tell that to the faithful who think the show is a dating manual.

The big complaint about “The Bachelor” has been that it’s demeaning to women. ABC, already casting for a sequel, may try to eviscerate that charge by letting one bachelorette choose from 25 men in a future edition. The really bold move would be to have a geriatric version, or even a middle-aged one. That would never fly, because the show is about people who look good in a mud bath looking for a partner. And it is very much about almost regular folks who want, more than anything, to be on TV. Women can’t imagine why Michel would have to wife-hunt so publicly. Men don’t understand why the women would risk getting their hearts broken in prime time.

In fact, the show is as much about the quest for fame as the search for love. As they’ve been doing the rounds on talk shows, the women who were dumped admitted that falling in love would have been nice. But being on TV was cool enough. “The Bachelor” isn’t the story of the perfect union of Alex and Amanda Marsh. Between commercials for diamond rings and herpes medications, it celebrates the wedding of a voyeuristic audience and a group of exuberantly exhibitionist players--a match made in TV heaven.