A few weeks ago, I wrote an article ranking the villains from the Bachelor and Bachelorette franchise. But after writing it, I felt wrong for doing so. While it's very well-known that the producers play a large role in the creation of drama and cliff-hangers, they are not so much blamed for their creation of villains.
Let's take the most recent example of Corinne Olympios. At the beginning of Nick Viall's season, Corinne was pinned as the villain almost immediately following her introductory video. Yes, it is very easy to hate someone extremely wealthy and as gorgeous as Corinne off the bat but her aggressive attitude towards Nick certainly rubbed watchers and contestants (*cough* Taylor *cough*) the wrong way. However, towards the end of the season, the Corinne-hate-train had less passengers as we got to see the better sides of her like her hilarious and quotable comments like cheese pasta and her infatuation with naps. What I also noticed is there was a stunning amount of articles about how much we hated Corinne but the same exact amount of articles about how we all relate to Corinne. By hating her, are we just hating certain sides of our self?
Without going too "Carrie Bradshaw" on this topic, I will say that the producers have a great deal to do with who becomes the enemy on not just the Bachelor but almost every reality TV show. Let's take for example the show that really kicked off the reality tv trend of strangers living in a house together i.e. The Real World. On an episode of E!'s True Hollywood Stories, former Real World cast member John Brennan stated that the producers pushed him to say he hated another cast member, Tami Roman, for having an abortion when in actuality he didn't feel any hatred towards Roman.
It's little instances like this that juice the show's watchability-- and that's what producers are after for in the long run. How much drama can we put into the show to make it more watchable? If you have Real World contestants or Bachelor contestants getting along all the time, no one will want to watch it.
And yes, we as an audience are guilty for feeding them these responses. We loved to hate so many of the villains from past seasons, but what's interesting is that after the show and the "Men/Women Tell All" airs, the cast-mates seem alright, if not really good friends with one another. How can that be?
ABC's newest Bachelorette Rachel stated that she became really good friends with Corinne during their time together. We as an audience saw this towards the season's later episodes that Corinne wasn't rubbing anyone the wrong way anymore.
So the formula seems to be this: have a villain from the get-go and create instances for that villain to cause drama (i.e. putting Corinne on all the group dates, plotting Corinne against Taylor on the two on one) and let the audiences devour it until the drama comes from the Bachelor/Bachelorette's hard love decisions towards the end and not the inter-house drama.
As an audience, we've seen so many villains "redeem" themselves later in the seasons or in the spinoffs like Bachelor in Paradise (like Nick for instance?) So we should be wary about what's being fed to us at the beginning of the season and be cautious about automatically joining in the hate frenzy (though it can be fun and enticing) against one particular contestant.
I know we love the drama because it makes silly shows like this watchable, but we need to keep in mind that these "villains" are real people too with real emotions that get viciously attacked once the show airs.
Furthermore, would you want these things said about you?
