Watching Bachelorette Rachel Cross-Examine Her Shitty Suitor DeMario Quite Frankly Rocked
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On Monday night, two women 3,000 miles apart, one deeply familiar with the franchise, the other much less so, watched Episode 2 of Rachel’s season of The Bachelorette separately. This is their story.
Kate: I found last night’s episode impressively exciting, a response I’ll attribute to Rachel’s natural effervescence, but also because they featured celebrity cameos with people who actually watch and love the show (apparently the way to be relatable these days is to be a celebrity who likes to gush about The Bachelor universe) and some really good drama!
Kara: Of the two cameos, I was most shocked and thrilled by Kareem Abdul Jabbar. When Rachel started introducing the person who would clearly be some basketball player, he was easily one of the last people I expected. I thought he gave very good advice and in general was a calming presence for a group of dudes who were trying to out-testosterone each other in front of Rachel. Also, I now realize how much he and I have in common considering we’ve both been past skeptics who have been won over by non-scripted television programs!
Kate: Yeah, those who haven’t should check out Kareem’s post for The Hollywood Reporter, in which he explains how, after writing a piece for THR in January titled “The Bachelor’ Is Killing Romance in America,” the producers invited him to come on the show. What I found notable about his new piece is that in it, he says that the producers knew soon after it was published that their Bachelorette would likely be Rachel.
After my article appeared — and while Viall’s Bachelor season was being broadcast with Rachel still in the mix — the producers of The Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise called me up to tell me that the upcoming Bachelorette would feature a black woman. There were three black women among the remaining contestants, and though the producers wouldn’t reveal whom it would be, clearly Rachel had been a standout. They then asked me if I would like to come on the show and run the men through some basketball drills that would reveal some of their character traits to Rachel. As a fan of the shows, I naturally agreed.
Timing-wise, his comments suggest that their decision came relatively early in the season airing (this would have been before Week 5, when Jami King was eliminated), which is pretty interesting!
Athletes have appeared on this show before, usually to facilitate physical challenges like this one—who can forget the poor decision during JoJo’s season to feature Ben Roethlisberger—but none that I remember have been as thoughtful a presence as Kareem. He wiped the memory of Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher right out of my mind.
It also didn’t hurt that the date he was on was a doozy.
Kara: Let me just say, I did not appreciate Ashton and Mila’s continued, wooden insistence that they have lots of sex. We get it, guys! You have babies! We know how they got there!
I can’t say this on any authority because this is of course, for all intents and purposes, my first season of The Bachelorette, but I get the sense that everyone involved really wants this to work out for Rachel. She’s obviously so damn delightful; with Mila and Ashton, for example, they seemed rather invested in her having a good time and not ending up with a guy who sucks. With Kareem, obviously he also finds her likable, but I’d also guess he’d love for this to go well relationship and ratings-wise for the first black woman on this program. Maybe I’m reading too much into it or maybe people seem this invested every season but it was an observation.
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