ABC is trying really hard to get us to give a fuck about the next season of The Bachelor, and its desperately long viewership campaign began this weekend with the cast announcement and will continue with a Countdown to Arie special airing on Monday night. While I didn’t read the full bios yet because who has time for that shit and also IDGAF, there is a lot of insight to be gathered solely from the contestants’ basic information and mall-style glamour shots.
So I’m going to pull out my one statistics class in grad school skills to dissect Arie’s women and answer some of these burning questions: Does Arie like blondes or brunettes? Did ABC give diversity a real shot? Is there such thing as too young? And are any of these women here for the right reasons? (Spoiler alert: definitely not).
Arie Definitely Has A Thing For Blondes
We probably could have guessed this since he was the runner up on real-life-Disney-princess Emily Maynard’s season five years ago (legit still can’t believe they couldn’t find ANYONE more relevant). But ABC’s casting this season has made his (or their) hair color preference painfully obvious: 13 of the Bachelorettes are blonde af white girls who look like some variation of Olivia Caridi or Lauren Bushnell from Ben Higgins’ season. And to no one’s surprise, there isn’t one fucking redhead in sight.
A Diverse Cast Of Laurens
The franchise finally cast its first African American lead last season, but despite Rachel being the most kickass lead ever, the show’s ratings were less than fantastic. While I will continue to blame ABC for being racist, when 80% of the franchise’s audience is white, it’s probably just America’s fault. So it’s no surprise that 72% of the contestants this season are white, and three of them are named Lauren (there’s a fourth Lauren, too, because why not—she’s just not white). It’s safe to assume that half of the diversity will be cut by episode two and we’ll have ourselves a white Christmas season with solid ratings.
Mind The Age Gap
Arie is 36 years old, the same age Nick Viall was during his season. If we learned anything from that season and subsequent breakup (besides that Nick is boring) it’s that a cast of much younger women isn’t the best way to build a successful relationship (but it IS the best way to build a future Bachelorette). So did ABC learn its lesson? Nope. The average age of Arie’s girls women is 27, only two are within five years of his 36, and one is so embarrassingly young that ABC didn’t even tell us her age (Reality Steve deduced that she is 22, so she’s been drinking legally for a year—that’ll be fun to watch).
What Is “The Right Reason” Anyway?
The definition of “right reasons” on The Bachelor has changed over the years from “get married and have babies” to “get engaged and move to LA to launch a couples brand”. We all know it’s rarely about finding true love and usually about finding entertaining personalities for future spin-off shows. So how do Arie’s girls stack up to the new norm? Four of them already work in marketing, and eight already live in California. No one appears to have a location-specific career, at least one of them is besties with a former contestant, and I can picture literally all of them in Diff Eyewear sunglasses.
So if I were the betting kind (which I am, who wants to start a bracket?), I would put my money on Arie proposing to a twentysomething blonde named Lauren who will “go anywhere and quit any job” for love.
