Core Post: Mittell, and my hope that this is the last time I ever talk about this season of The Bachelor

     I really appreciated Mittel’s thoughtful intervention into television’s fraught and oft oversimplified genre studies, presented in his introduction to his book, Television Genres as Cultural Categories. I was especially interested by Mittell’s push to define television genre categories not merely by their text, but by “the widest possible range of sources, including corporate documents, regulatory policies, audience responses, filmic representations, promotional materials” (14), along with the text. However, in a time of increasingly abundant content, coupled with an increasingly fractured audience, I am wondering if this method is even possible to enact. Specifically, I am thinking about the show The Bachelor, and specifically a segment from the most recent “Women Tell All” episode that aired this past season. In it, Chris Harrison takes a moment and asks Rachel Lindsay, the only Black Bachelorette in the show’s history, to come up on stage and speak about an utterly generic “hate” that many of the women contestants face on their social media after airing. This hate, though much of it is clearly rooted in racism- hence, Rachel’s appearance- is never explicitly named as such. Even when a vile and prejudiced message directed at Sidney, a young mixed woman from the South, is read aloud to the audience (with expletives, including the n-word, specifically blurred out), no mention of specifically prejudiced hate is discussed.

     Of course, we can read the text of the episode and synthesize about how broadcast reality television (and perhaps reality television on other platforms- looking at you Love is Blind) fails to understand and convey racial difference in thoughtful and historically accurate ways. However, can these private messages be included when considering audience response to this show? Do these messages speak to what The Bachelor and, by extension, reality dating shows, “mean for specific groups in a particular cultural instance” (5)? Does this group of audience members that spew hate to contestants help us define the genre? Even when the show itself decries these forms of participation and praises other, more benign, expressions of fandom (like the watch parties Chris Harrison and this year’s Bachelor, Peter, attend)? Akin to the questions Kackman ponders in his piece “Quality Television: Melodrama and Cultural Complexity,” I wonder- how do we understand this labor from a certain sub-sect of the Bachelor audience, and how can we tie it back to genre studies?