okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

From the very first season of the Bachelor it always struck me how African-American contestants seemed to always be among the first kicked off of the show. Curiously, producers may have felt some pressure to have at least some actually compete, just to be politically correct, but when you actually see the Bachelor or Bachelorette themselves at work it is clear that an African-American probably is not going to be the one given that final rose. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and simply reflects what I have always felt happens when you try to throw some minorities into the mix with the All American; someone wants to try on a new pair of shoes but they do not always fit. Typically the African-American is among the first few who leave, everyone moves on, and you root for whoever it is that you want to win. Just lambs before the slaughter too often you have to worry about whether affirmative action did not get them on the show or if they truly deserved to be there.

So rather than try to see an African-American or any other minority through to completion on that show perhaps we could have our own iteration of the Bachelor. I’m sure the idea has floated around before, it is just that ABC, now owned by Disney, is in a curious place in really trying to see such a project to fruition. For one the idea of doing so is a bit offensive and definitely politically incorrect, for another it suggests that it is just one more attempt to take a mainstream idea, a square peg, having tried to fit it into the round hole of everything counter cultural.

Would these characters play up to negative stereotypes giving us that real and authentic “Black” experience or would these be characters that just happen to be Black that could have had just as much of a chance on the real Bachelor if the odds weren’t stacked against them? We all know how reality television works, and how things typically end up going down. An African-American variant on Bachelor is most likely a dissapointing caricature of the real show just as many African-American sitcoms are poor iterations of traditional, mainstream sitcoms like Friends and Frazier; a miserable compromise, often lacking in true chemistry and genius.

This show could be like Survivor and purposely go out of it’s way to develop a season where race played a significant part in framing the context of the drama, but then again those things only tend to work for CBS and FOX. So yet I am torn; if an African-American, or any other minority for that matter, does win on The Bachelor, I have to be able to truly believe it for myself, at the same time if they have their own special editions of the Bachelor for minorities I might watch it for the novelty, yet find a disgust and bad taste in my mouth after a few episodes just to return at the end.

Perhaps the show I am really thinking about already exists on VH1. I Love New York, and Flavor of Love, are all great examples of what happens when you allow minorities to turn the Bachelor concept on it’s ear. This could very well be a show that we truly do not need. Yet if ABC were desperate for ratings and would ever digress towards throwing a monkey wrench into a tried and true formula I think a lot more people would watch than anyone would be willing to admit …