WINTER GAMES WITH A DIFFERENT PRIZE
‘The Bachelor’, already an international hit, is gambling on a much more multicultural cast in its newest iteration
Just after sundown on a Thursday in early December, Chris Harrison — host of The Bachelor and its spinoffs — stood in a mountaintop lodge in this Vermont ski town. The cavernous room had been draped in the fashion typical to Bachelor cocktail parties; candles burned, sequined pillows beckoned, and a stocked bar stood at the ready. Mr Harrison’s eyes scanned a cluster of sofas, all of them at that moment, empty.
“Who’s not here for the right reasons?” he said, invoking a Bachelor catchphrase as he looked out intensely at no one.
Mr Harrison was rehearsing a scene for the ABC series, The Bachelor Winter Games, in which he would ask the cast to choose someone to send home that night. His script was familiar to any fan of the franchise, except for a tweak to the ending. Tonight, Mr Harrison went on, the eliminated contestants would be “on a plane — back to whatever country you came from”.
Winter Games combines 26 alumni from both domestic and international versions of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. The twist is a first for the franchise, and a gamble. Bachelor shows tend to feature the same faces, with talent hopping from one of the flagship shows to the other, then surfacing again on a spinoff, like the bacchanalian Bachelor in Paradise. With Winter Games, the franchise is challenging a fan base not particularly open to change to embrace a cast filled with contestants from outside the United States (and some who don’t speak much English).
“I felt like the curiosity around our show was large enough that it could extend past our American cast,” Mike Fleiss, the creator and an executive producer of the Bachelor shows, said by phone after filming had wrapped.
“We’re very big in Canada, where they have both the American and Canadian versions. They’re able to process both. I thought our American audience could, too.”
Mr Fleiss said the idea behind Bachelor Winter Games originated at a yearly gathering of Bachelor producers from all over the world. (There are versions of The Bachelor in 37 countries, while The Bachelorette airs in 13.) “There were producers from Japan, Romania, Germany,” Mr Fleiss said in an earlier phone conversation. “I thought, how do I bring this to life?’”
The format he and his team settled on: four episodes of reality television that, like the Winter Olympics, will include athletic events, among them a biathlon and ice dancing. (Unlike the Olympics, it will also feature filmed romantic interactions and crying jags unrelated to lifelong goals.)
Winter Games will resemble Bachelor in Paradise in format, a sort of romantic free-forall in which anyone is eligible to date anyone else, and elimination strategies vary. Eleven countries besides the US are represented in the cast.
Mr Fleiss would have liked that number to be higher. But securing overseas talent proved difficult. News out of Washington strained the producers’ visa negotiations with other countries. “Our president didn’t make things any easier,” Mr Fleiss said.
Back on the mountaintop, Ms Iaconetti did seem nervous — and she wasn’t the only one. The cast members filed in to fill the sofas Mr Harrison had practiced in front of, loosely grouping themselves into Americans and notso. They seemed uncharacteristically subdued (for Bachelor get-togethers), except for Yuki Kimura of Japan, who clasped Champagne as she consulted with a producer who stood out of frame, translating something for her. After a moment, Ms Kimura, 21, who speaks little English, turned and flashed a grin at an American contestant, Dean Unglert.
“Dean, please!” she cried out, breaking the near-silence. “Me, rose!”
In the control room, producers laughed approvingly. “I need a ringtone of her,” one said.
Over the next hour, Ms Kimura, who wore a white tutu skirt for the occasion, proved to be a ringtone-worthy breakout. She got creative as she chatted with each male contestant, making heart shapes out of her fingers or giving a thumbs-up to express her enthusiasm. She entreated one man to teach her the English words for her nose and eyes, gamely pointing a long, copper-polished nail at each of her facial features.
Ms Kimura’s performance was exactly the kind Mr Fleiss hoped Winter Games would uncover. “The international cast members are more unfiltered than the Americans tend to be now,” he said. “They’re a little less careful about their potential Instagram values.” In Mr Fleiss’s perfect world, Winter Games would spawn a few non-American sensations he could recast on other shows in the Bachelor universe.
But whether American audiences will fall in love with newcomers like her remains to be seen. Bachelor Nation, as the franchise’s fan base is called, has baulked at departures from tradition before. In 2017, the first Bachelorette chapter to star an African-American woman — Rachel Lindsay, a lawyer from Dallas — drew precipitously fewer viewers than the season before it.
“I found it incredibly disturbing in a Trumpish kind of way,” Mr Fleiss said. “How else are you going to explain the fact that she’s down in the ratings, when — black or white — she was an unbelievable bachelorette? It revealed something about our fans.”
Is he worried that a Winter Games audience might react the same way to foreign stars? “I really don’t know,” Mr Fleiss said, after a pause. He acknowledged that he is concerned about Winter Games scenes that exclude American talent altogether. “The scenes that feature two international cast members talking to each other are tricky,” he said. “I don’t know how we get around that, but I can feel that it won’t play as well on American television.”
But Mr Fleiss, who first brought The Bachelor to television 16 years ago, still isn’t feeling risk averse. Of casting a nonwhite lead, he said, “I’m raring to try it again. I think it’s important.”
As the night wore on and the drinks set in, the American and international talent began mingling more warmly. Before long, the room took on the air of a diplomatic summit. Some contestants clapped each other on the back and made promises about “staying friends”.
Others negotiated at length over roses without ever promising anything. When Mr Harrison broke the news that an elimination was nigh, an American contestant named Jamey suggested the cast act multilaterally to resist.
The night’s sudden bonhomie continued for the rest of the shoot, with the cast members tiptoeing around talk of real-world international relations. “I thought we were going to be a little cliquier,” Ms Iaconetti said. “But we all had something in common: being on these shows. We had something to bond over.”
Mr Unglert, the object of Ms Kimura’s plea for a rose, agreed. “Everyone got along so well,” he said. “After a couple of days, we were looking around, saying, ‘Man, I wonder who the villain’s supposed to be’.”
Ms Kimura was incredulous, too, that drama didn’t break out among the contestants. “But it wasn’t like that at all,” she said. “Everyone was nice and cheerful.”
And that state of affairs — if it turns out to be true — may be the Winter Games element that Bachelor Nation finds most foreign.