IT'S ABOUT TIME
Jenn Tran is the first Asian American in the Bachelorette spotlight
At seven minutes until 11 p.m. on Monday, a collective scream erupted from a Brooklyn bar.
I'd dropped by a viewing party for the live season finale of ABC's The Bachelor, a show that I've watched since its first season 22 years ago.
Seemingly every hopeless-romantic 20-something woman in New York City, plus a couple of supportive boyfriends and other guys had crowded into Syndicated, a Bushwick watering house that has hosted Bachelor Nation watch parties for years. We wanted to see find out who tennis-teaching pro Joey Graziadei would propose to.
Would it be Daisy Kent, the bubbly blond who recently got a cochlear implant to correct near-total hearing loss? Or would it be Kelsey Anderson, the sweet construction manager who lost her mom to breast cancer six years ago? (The bar was Team Kelsey, who did win Joey's heart.)
What we hadn't prepared for was host Jesse Palmer's announcement about who'd be the next Bachelorette: Jenn Tran, the first Asian American lead in franchise history.
“We've wanted it to be Jenn ever since she stepped out of the limo!” screamed one of two Vietnamese American women sitting next to me. Tran is a fellow Vietnamese American with immigrant parents who's studying to be a physician assistant.
Tran, too, seemed to realize the significance of the moment. “Growing up I always wanted to see Asian representation on TV and I feel like it was really sparse,” she told Palmer. “Any time Asians were in the media, it was to fill a supporting character role, to fulfil some sort of stereotype. ... And now, to be here today, sitting in this position, being like, `I am going to lead my own love story, I am going to be the main character in my own story,' I just can't help but think of how many people I'm inspiring and how many lives I'm going to change.”
The Bachelor is an object of fascination for many who see it as a window into societal progress. And as the longest-running dating show on television, with millions of viewers, it has cultural significance that is often dismissed in ways that reek of sexism.
“I think that we refuse to take lighthearted or fluffy-coded culture seriously at our own peril,” said Emma Gray, co-host of the Love To See It podcast, which examines The Bachelor franchise through a feminist lens. “Millions of people are tuning into this show every week. It is the gold standard of reality dating shows (that) every reality dating show that comes after it is reacting to ... Does casting Jenn as the lead achieve some grand goal of racial equality? No. But can it move the needle in terms of what we as a culture deem desirable, worthy of attention, a person with a lived experience worthy of us all connecting to? I think it really can.”
“When I was little, I would have killed to have seen this, or when I was watching the show in college or high school, even,” said Sharleen Joynt, a biracial Chinese Canadian opera singer from season 18. Ten years ago, she was one of the first Asian contestants to make it significantly far on the show.
All that Ali Barthwell, Vulture's Bachelor recapper and a threetime Emmy-winning writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, could think of was that Tran was trying too hard to cultivate a funny-hot-girl personality.
“I want her to have a great time and get everything she's looking for, but she just is very awkward when she's put on the spot. I mean, that's the sign of true equality — when every race, every creed can be represented as an OK Bachelorette season,” said Barthwell, who is Black.
The show's failure to cast an Asian lead, until now, has become a running joke among fans. The podcast Game of Roses, in which the hosts recap the shows like they're major sports events, even ends episodes with a countdown: “It's been 8,037 days without an Asian Bachelor.”
To understand why it's been so long, you need to know how the show works. The Bachelor (one guy dating 32 women) and The Bachelorette (one woman dating 32 men) are stuck in a somewhat toxic feedback loop. Typically, the chosen Bachelorette is the person on the previous Bachelor season who has the best “deserving of love” story. She's almost always someone who made it into the Bachelor's final four, gone to the Hometown or Fantasy Suite dates and had her heart broken. If a white lead only has white love interests, then only white people advance to the stage where they can get cast as the next lead, and so on. Tran never made it past Joey's top six, which would've put her out of the running, and is one reason her selection came as a surprise.
When Joynt was filming the show in 2013, she said, the idea that she could become Bachelorette was out of her realm of thinking. “I was of course aware that no one else looks like me, but I wasn't really focused on it,” said Joynt, who now is host of Bachelor in Paradise: Canada.
“But when the show starts airing, and you start getting messages from people, just with general excitement that you are Asian and are on this show, it was like, `Oh wow, that is kind of a big deal.'”