In recent months, two brown men have assumed highly publicized roles as two mainstays of the romance genre: the rake and the bachelor. The rake is Regé-Jean Page, the actor who plays Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings, on “Bridgerton,” the Shonda Rhimes-produced adaptation of Julia Quinn’s best-selling novels, which was released on Netflix in December. Winsome and hot, giving his best brood, Page swaggered into the part of the withholding love interest, skulking amid the social scenery of Regency-era London. Right on his heels came Matt James, the star of the latest season of “The Bachelor,” who was heralded as the first Black leading man in the franchise’s twenty-four-season history, following Rachel Lindsay, who, in 2017, became the first Black Bachelorette. Both “Bridgerton” and “The Bachelor” inspired, as they surely were intended to, a blitz of pop-minded racial discourse. What does it mean—because it must, indeed, mean, and if not we will make it so—that Black people can now be found where they were least expected, among the upper echelons of these historically white mating rituals? If there is any urgency to the inquiry, for me, it is as a matter of dignity: when one is invited to the party so late, and with such fanfare, one likes to at least know whether the welcome is flattering.
In the case of “Bridgerton,” what at first seemed like merely “race-blind” casting turned out to be a bit of counter-historical world-building. As we learned midway through the series, the show’s fictionalized version of England, once “two separate societies, divided by color,” was brought together as one by cause of King George III’s Black bride, Queen Charlotte. It was a thinly constructed conceit, laid out in a single scene, but it was enough to provoke analyses and criticism of a postcolonial bent. (A scene in which the Duke curled his tongue along the surface of a silver sugar spoon, some pointed out, ignored the plunderous history of the colonial sugar trade.) What interested me, though, as a viewer of both “Bridgerton” and “The Bachelor,” was that the rake and the bachelor shared daddy issues: their prospects for finding love hinged upon their ability to exorcise the presence of another familiar type, the absent Black patriarch. In “Bridgerton,” Simon vows never to reproduce, out of spite toward his cruel and neglectful late father. This filial promise is the engine of the show’s drama: the Duke, after going forward with marriage, to the blonde and nervy Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor), denies her his seed. But the story did not get mired in the father-son business—there was romance to get on with, after all. The Duke’s sidelong roguishness, and the heat between him and Daphne, made for livelier screen time.
“The Bachelor,” which concluded on Monday night, had less luck keeping its love plot on track. Matt, as the child of an interracial marriage—his mother is white, his father is Black—is open to finding love across the color line, he informed us at the beginning of the season. But all Bachelors, no matter how young, come with some baggage to justify the fact that they’ve remained unmarried (“I like to party” presumably not being enough to satisfy the casting directors). Matt’s has to do with his father, a philanderer whose infidelities led his parents to split. For much of the season, which was filmed within the parameters of quarantine, things went as well as could be expected, perhaps even better. Matt, who was twenty-eight at the time of filming, fit and generically good-looking, like a grownup jock, spent the first half of the season trying on the show’s trademark idioms—“building a connection,” per the parlance. Race was not forgotten, but its presence had settled to a low thrum, even as the number of beautiful Black and brown contestants dwindled with each rose that was extended.
But, in January, compromising old photos surfaced online, in the way they do nowadays. They showed one of the contestants, Rachael Kirkconnell, a palatable brunette out of Georgia, gussied up among her fellow ADPi sorority sisters, en route to a plantation-themed college ball. Something similar had happened before: during Rachel Lindsay’s season of “The Bachelorette,” racist tweets sent by a contestant named Lee Garrett surfaced shortly after the première. In both cases, filming of the show had wrapped long before, and the proceedings onscreen continued in blissful ignorance. But while Garrett got the boot halfway through his season, Kirkconnell remained week after week. Meanwhile, the show continued to exhibit its fondness for stereotype, milking the narrative of the missing Black dad. The penultimate episode led with a meeting between Matt and his father. The men talked past each other in the ten minutes between commercials, two relative strangers caught in a conciliatory arc. Pop-psych idioms were trotted out—fear, negativity, hindered growth, demons. “I want to be the man he wasn’t,” Matt tells Michelle, the athletic Black schoolteacher from Minnesota, during one of the series’ euphemism-laden “overnights,” after slathering her with butter. Lindsay was so disturbed by the show’s bare-assed embrace of the trope of Black fatherlessness that she broke a self-imposed hiatus on “bachelor talk” to appear on the Ringer’s “Bachelor Party” podcast. “Who greenlit this?” she asked.
Reality TV thrives on the entertainment value of its villains, and, in the end, the villain of this season was neither the absent Black father nor the racist white woman. For all of the show’s fondness for genre cliché, someone should have seen it coming: the call was coming from inside the house. In the wake of the Kirkconnell revelations, the show’s longtime host, Chris Harrison, attempted what could most generously be considered damage control, in an interview with Lindsay on “Extra.” “It’s not a good look,” Lindsay said matter-of-factly, of the Kirkconnell photos. “Is it a good look in 2018 or is it not a good look in 2021?” Harrison responded, in the “just asking questions” spirit, pointing out that the photos were three whole years old. The interview devolved from there, with Lindsay offering Harrison the softest of landings and Harrison instead aiming straight for the concrete. It wasn’t a good look in 2021. On February 10th, Harrison announced on Instagram that he would “be stepping aside for a period of time.” A new host, the former N.F.L. linebacker Emmanuel Acho, would take over the post-finale special “After the Final Rose.” The author of a book called “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man,” Acho was, he told “Good Morning America,” prepared for “the most uncomfortable conversation in the history of ‘The Bachelor’ franchise.”
“As the saying goes, when you know you know,” Harrison, smiling and ageless, crowed at the top of the season. He and “The Bachelor” may very well be the most steadfast couple in the show’s history, united for almost two decades; speculation over his fate with the franchise nearly eclipsed interest in Matt’s big decision. (Last weekend, it was announced that the upcoming season of “The Bachelorette” will be hosted by the former Bachelorettes Tayshia Adams and Kaitlyn Bristowe.) In 2018, after another rocky “Bachelor” season, Kathryn VanArendonk, at Vulture, made a compelling case that it was time for Harrison to retire. He is “a human-shaped instantiation of network notes,” she wrote, eerily comfortable with shepherding contestants through the pipeline of high drama and heartbreak. “It feels unfair to blame Harrison for doing his job, which is to say, it feels unfair to blame the puppet for having a puppet-master,” VanArendonk added. Letting the puppet off its string when race talk was on the loose was the show’s big mistake. Detached from the lights, camera, action, and scripted platitudes of confessionals and rose ceremonies, Harrison short-circuited, sounding more like a generic wealthy and white upper-forties dad than the smooth impresario of ABC’s tentpole programming. (“I am not the woke police,” he told Lindsay.) How very American for an institution to fear disturbance from a suited-up Black man only to end up buffeted by the white guy who’s been there all along.
Meanwhile, there was a strange pathos to Matt’s predicament, a dramatic irony in the discord between what had unfolded onscreen and off. For the finale, it was down to Rachael and Michelle: two finalists, Black and white, each a spiritual half of Matt’s televised journey. He couldn’t have known that Rachael liked to dress up and play slave mistress, but he had to have at least perceived her as the type for whom such a thing might be a possibility. (The man grew up in North Carolina, after all.) If not for the pesky Internet, he seemed poised to ride off with his white girl in peace. Small “r” romance, like other dime-store fiction, is a workhorse, able to withstand the flightier forces of politics and taste. Those immature enough to snicker while strolling past the spinning Harlequin display, or channel-surfing past “The Bachelor,” miss the fact that the interchangeable cast of characters and recycled plotlines are exactly the point. Marriage, love, babies—for the Duke and Daphne, they arrived in that order. “Bridgerton” ’s racialized drama was cannily calibrated, lending the romance a certain frisson without hampering its expected course. On “The Bachelor,” the pileup of racial faux pas intruded on the fantasy. The three-hour season finale, on Monday night, was a slow crawl to the finish. Giving the rose to Michelle—lovely, drama-free Michelle—would have been the better look, but we all knew what was coming. Or did we? Sex, love, uncomfortable conversation: it doesn’t have the same ring.
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