Marisa DiPaolo
Simultaneous Satisfaction of the Savvy and Sentimental: A Look at how The Bachelor Entertains the Needs of its Contemporary Audience”
This paper explores the reality television program, The Bachelor, and the way in which it simultaneously satisfies the needs of its internally sentimental and externally savvy contemporary audience. Existing research, which acknowledges The Bachelor as a realistic work of constructed fiction, is combined with an examination of the show's realist influences to pinpoint the ways in which the series manipulates and constructs reality. An analysis of the show's nineteenth season is then used to demonstrate the program's effective evocation of narrative, emotional, and visual realism, as well as postmodern self-reflexivity, in order to ultimately assert The Bachelor as an innovative work of "postmodern realism".
