There’s a Winter Olympics-Themed ‘Bachelor’ Spinoff Coming, and We’ve Got Questions
With the season 13 premiere of The Bachelorette already threatening to hold your TV hostage in just a few days, ABC announced yesterday that in February 2018, a new spinoff of the Bachelor mega-franchise will be set loose upon the innocent world. Few details are available yet, but we do know that it will be horribly titled The Bachelor Winter Games, contestants will compete in Winter Olympic Games-themed athletic challenges, and that it will purportedly “take competitive dating to a chilling new level.” As you might suspect, we have a few questions.
1. Really? REALLY? Another spinoff? You needed more hours of trashy television to senselessly destroy the already-weakened braincells of your viewers?
2. Do you realize that I already watch a combined 31 episodes of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and Bachelor in Paradise per year? And that episodes usually run between one and THREE hours? I can’t afford to watch someone dogsled for three hours, ABC. I can’t and I won’t!
3. Winter Games? Really? That’s the title? Did no one think of Bachelor on Ice? Or Bachelor in ParadICE, perhaps? How little do you pay your writers that this was the garbage, pun-less title they handed in?
4. You do realize that every time you send the lady contestants on some kind of an athletic challenge, at least one winds up crying her eyes out, right? Is that how you plan to reel me in? Pretty girls crying their mascara off while I laugh and get wine wasted? Damn, well played.
5. Why would you make it winter themed? Your shows are 82 per cent frolicking women in bikinis. You’re going to lose all of your male viewers (even the ones who were forced to watch at first, but come back week after week for, you guessed it, bikinis!) if the ladies are doing challenges in toques, puffy coats, and runny noses.
6. Am I the only person who would quit the show immediately once I found out there were nonstop athletic challenges week after week? Fake laughing at an airhead Bachelor’s jokes and standing for hours in heels praying for that final rose are doable. Snowshoe races and moguls? No thanks.
7. Oh my god, can you please please include cross-country skiing with rifle shooting as a challenge? Unless you have another Chad-type contestant, because he’d probably just murder everyone around him in a fit of steroidal rage. I mean, I’d totally tune in for that, but I’m sure your lawyers wouldn’t approve.
8. Speaking of murder, am I the only person whose mind went directly there when reading “take competitive dating to a chilling new level”? Chilling. A word that conjures up abduction, never-ending torture, and the inability to escape. Which….kind of describes The Bachelor. Okay, fine, you get a pass on this one.
9. Can you make Michelle Kwan the Bachelorette? She’s newly divorced and, hello, a world-famous figure skater. No one could be more perfect.
10. The description that Winter Games will be bringing past favourites and villains together at a luxury winter resort kind of make this sound like a rehash of Bachelor Pad. You remember that show fizzling out and getting cancelled, right? Just checking.
11. At what point did you think you needed a cold, clothing-layered, physically taxing, lame little brother show for the enjoyably booze-soaked Bachelor in Paradise? Newsflash: Ya don’t. Kthx.
12. Is it terrible that I’m jones-ing to see who you’re bringing back for it? Such is the power you have over me!
13. Is it Chad? It’s Chad, isn’t it?
14. What American Olympians will you ruthlessly con to be a guest on Winter Games? Which one will look the most despondent that this is where life has led? Shaun White? Brian Boitano? TONYA HARDING?? Damn it, I want to watch so bad now.
15. Chad for sure, right?
