When I first reviewed “The Bachelor” back in 2002, I was so appalled by that slave market full of dancing girls ready to sell themselves to some loser you wouldn’t want to have lunch with, let alone compete for, I wrote:
“How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways:
You are degrading, debasing, desperate, depressing, dull, and dopey.”
Eight long years and endless self-esteem damage to women later, we’ve come to the most embarrassing season ever, one that’s called “The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love,” a title awful and cheesy enough, however, to fit perfectly with the incredibly cheesy loser “Bachelor,” named Jake Pavelka, a pilot.
Yes, I mean “loser” literally since ole Jake got the boot last season on the equally debasing show, “The Bachelorette,” when Bachelorette Jillian threw him to the curb.
This season, Jake, who only speaks in clichés, such as “I feel so sad right now,” “You’ve got to keep opening up to me,” is so creepy even the horrid women who show up with pink luggage have started, er, flying away.
At the beginning of the season, one of the contestants was so turned off by him that she allegedly got caught in an in flagrante snog with a show producer. Instead of waiting to be denied a rose, she and the producer both got canned. Hey — maybe one actual relationship can come out of the show after all. (So far there’s been one marriage out of 14 seasons!)
Last week, contestant Ali, in a move straight out of the 1950’s, told Jake that she had to decide between her career and her love for him. Hahahaha.
When he refused to choose her right off the bat and possibly end his reality TV career a few weeks early (he said he had feelings for all the women and couldn’t yet decide — right!), she got out while the getting was good.
Maybe poor Ali never saw that classic movie, “The Best of Everything” (circa 1959), where “women who go to business” never end up happy?
In fact, as one man warns a “career girl” who chooses a job over a life of housewifery: “You’re afraid of being a real woman!”
Of course, nobody’s ever accused cheeseball Jake of being a real man. You can put as many lumberjack shirts on this guy (with tasteful matching T-shirt jauntily peeking through) but, sorry, Jake, real men would rather die than take part in a rose ceremony, cry in the hallway (or around the fire, in the living room, in the pool, in the plane, and anywhere that’s humanly possible), or worse, utter the phrase, “The love of my life might be slipping through my fingers.”
Eeeyyewwww — this guy’s causing a worldwide Velveeta shortage. No wonder that not just last season’s Bachelorette, but two women this season chose work and great sex over a possible lifetime of rainbows, unicorns and picking out matching polos with Jake.
The Bachelor Monday, 8 p.m., ABC