Love is a spectator sport where the players are also spectating. We gather friends around the Apple TV while we swipe through potential lovers on Tinder. We consider everyone we swap spit with fair game for public dissection, so long as they do something strange and compelling enough for a viral tweet. Dating app disasters have a place on Tumblr, Instagram, and the shelf at your local Barnes & Noble. (That book, not coincidentally, was written by a former producer of The Bachelor.)
When it comes to love, the line between watcher and player is a slim and blurry one. This year, by jump-starting The Verge’s first Bachelor fantasy league (owing a great debt to Emily Yoshida and her Game of Game of Thrones), we will make it even harder to find.
The Bachelor, a television program in which one man dates anywhere from 20 to 30 women in hopes of marrying one at the end of two months, is now in its 21st season. That’s not counting 12 seasons of The Bachelorette, three seasons of the nihilistic shipwreck show that is Bachelor in Paradise, or three seasons of the ill-advised Bachelor Pad, the only spin-off that involved both emotional trauma and cash prizes. It is not the first reality TV dating show but it is currently the only one that matters. For ABC, the season premiere of a new unlucky-in-love babe’s hasty journey to marriage regularly trounces the competition in ratings. For Lifetime, it inspired a critically acclaimed (at first) and attention-grabbing fictional series about the behind-the-scenes — the producers who manipulate their stars in order to manipulate us, causing catastrophe and occasionally, by accident, love, in the name of good television.
the bachelor is about orchestrating catastrophe, and maybe, by accident, love
The Bachelor is also social media’s favorite sporting event. Live-tweeting The Bachelor and its many spin-offs is an art form not unlike live-tweeting football or the Oscars, and to capitalize on that fact ABC has just introduced an official fantasy league in tandem with ESPN. Every week, viewers can play with their families, friends, or the “Bachelor Nation” as a whole, competing for points that might eventually net them a trip to the chaotic post-finale special known as After the Final Rose. The game itself is much simpler than fantasy sports you might already be familiar with, as viewers can only place their bets on Bachelor Nick Viall’s final four contestants and his eventual “bride.” And since playing fantasy football often means weighing criminal charges against rushing yards, it’s less of a moral conundrum too!