On Monday night, two women watched the Men Tell All episode of Rachel’s season of The Bachelorette. This is their story.
Kate: First things first: let’s get on the same playing field. Clover, this wasn’t your first Men Tell All—or was it?
Clover: It was! As a first-time Bachelorette viewer but a long-time reunion show watcher, this episode really disappointed me and made me realize how much there’s an art to hosting a reunion. Bravo’s Andy Cohen plays that role well, asking the right follow-up questions, being shady and maintaining a balance with everyone’s stories. With this show, by the time Rachel stepped on stage I was emotionally exhausted from the Lee intervention, which they devoted a whole lot of time to.
Kate: For those deep in the Bachelor universe, I’d suggest a listen to Juliet Litman’s recent interview with ABC’s Rob Mills, who oversees reality programming at the network, which means he’s in charge of every Bachelor program. In the interview, Mills talks about a number of things—casting the first black Bachelorette, the Bachelor in Paradise situation (he’s adamant that nothing untoward went down and the whole investigation was handled completely responsibly), but in particular, he admits that they probably spent too much time this season focusing on Lee and Kenny’s fight. Which is why I found it astonishing that this special did the same. It begs the question: how worthwhile is it to watch a racist man be told he’s racist if he’s still not getting it, and our host seems to, at times, let him off the hook for his behavior? I really agreed with Kenny when he said to the audience, “If y’all thought y’all were sick of seeing it, I was very sick of living it” re: his dynamic with Lee.
Clover: What Kenny said was a good summation of what it’s probably like to be a minority on these types of shows, and it was quite crazy to see this smart group of black men explain racism to an uninformed white dude. Then again, that’s exactly the problem—that they were forced to articulate what’s supposed to be obvious, which is that racism is bad. Watching all the explanations, I felt like it was a burden those guys shouldn’t have had to carry that much and Chris should’ve interjected more as a host and recognized where the conversation was going. At any rate, the guys showed they were smart enough to figure Lee out in the moment as they were filming. I loved when Anthony, the bald black dude who looks like a professor, pointed out Lee’s “invisible racism” with a nice, eloquent speech.
For such a calculating character, though, Lee was surprisingly speechless and his demeanor threw me off. You could tell he had a hard time processing what the guys were saying and then articulating his own thoughts because maybe he was thinking too much about how he would be perceived. But I also don’t think he had the language to explain himself in a sensible way. The intervention felt uncomfortable, though not to where it seemed like there was progress being made. Maybe that’s just a reflection of how life works. The tiny realization that Lee had by the end is like the most realistic outcome, but getting there was mentally exhausting.
Kate: Lee’s epiphany felt really hollow to me. It was pretty clear that he’d spent zero time thinking about this before the special, which is nuts because it’s been months and months since filming, and at least several weeks since his tweets came out. (As an aside, it was weird that his defense of his tweet comparing the KKK to the NAACP was that his Facebook and Twitter accounts are hooked up and there was a second tweet supposed to come after that. What on earth was going to come next that would have absolved him? Particularly given the number of other highly offensive tweets directed at women and people of many races.)
While his appearance prompted some legitimately interesting conversations, ones I hope opened the eyes of the audience watching, the intro package with “best of” Men Tell All moments at the top primed me for a feeling I had the whole time, which is how the production company and the network were able to get away with casting this guy (who said things like “I’m facetious” to explain his “jokes”) in the first place. Note their rehashing of when Kaitlyn was attacked on social media for sleeping with Nick before Fantasy Suites, never addressing that the reason that happened was because they made that a plot point on the show! When Lee said “I feel like I have a lot to learn,” it felt like something the creators of this show—who still claim they didn’t know about his tweets before casting him—could take as a lesson as well.
Clover: Yeah, it didn’t make sense to me when Lee said the KKK/NAACP tweet was out of context—and then no follow-up from Chris??? Lee kept saying he should’ve been a better friend, and all he had to offer were vague excuses: “I don’t like racism at all. It bothers me morally.” And “I wasn’t as considerate as I should have been in a lot of ways.” Statements that say nothing. I think the pile-on may have sparked something in his brain, I just don’t know what he’s actually thinking because he didn’t provide any meaningful analysis of his thought process.