Bad TV & Specificity

November 2023

I was talking with some design friends about our time-sucks. You know, the stuff that feels equivalent to eating too many potato chips in one sitting. Playing a video game for hours before coming up for air. Scrolling Instagram Reels until they all bleed together.

I’m watching the Golden Bachelor with my friend Cat right now. We watch in the way some people watch football: Yeah, the people involved keep getting hurt. But it’s an excuse to make plans and eat snacks and keep up a running commentary on something outside our lives.

I change into fuzzy sweatpants and head over to her cozy house where I sink into the couch. I used to bring a tote bag with an embroidery project, but I never pulled it out to work on, so I’ve stopped. Some weeks we get right to watching, others begin with dinner or game-planning a project or talking about our jobs. We’re busy, we care about a lot of things, and then we turn our brains down and watch dumb tv. It’s good spending time as your softest self. It’s good to have a friend you can be unimpressive with.

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The Diversion

The Golden Bachelor, in case this isn’t your particular indulgence, is the first season of the Bachelor franchise that has elderly contestants. The titular Bachelor, Gerry, is a 72 year old man with a ‘Golly, gee whiz!” attitude about being plopped down in a mansion full of accomplished, funny women.

As a nod to aging well, the producers keep sending him on evening dates in classic cars. He has trouble driving in the dark on the new-to-him freeways. He also can’t get over how amazing it was that a woman puts her hand on his back to calm him down.

The show starts off sweet. The contestants dive deep right away (it turns out that all it takes to say “Wow, we really connected!” is to share that both lost a spouse). The 22 women keep commenting that they feel seen, that even with all these other women, Gerry really knows how to zone in during one-on-one conversation.

The thing that makes the women so hopeful (a man who pays attention!) is also the part that makes the show harder and harder to watch. Gerry is so in-the-moment, he doesn’t give hints that he’s about to eliminate a woman. He’s kissing her and all her friends with the eagerness of, well, a 72-year-old man who has 22 interested women hanging around.

The rush of wonder he expresses would be sweet for one woman, but when you see him act similarly with nearly all of them?
I start to feel sick to my stomach.

It’s harder to brush off the emotional turmoil this season. With the classic setup, you understand a 23 year old is bummed when she’s eliminated, but then you see her rack up the social media followers and net a sponsorship deal and start a podcast, and it seems like she got a good deal.

But with these contestants, some dating for the first time since the loss of their spouse, the crushing of their new beginning is palpable. The Bachelor franchise tries to spin it as a season of hope, but I just get twitchier.

I yell at the onscreen antics, much like my uncles over the Thanksgiving football game. Cat pauses the episode and we say what we’d do differently before firing it up again.

The thing I’m stuck on most right now is this part of the ‘journey’ where the final three women bring Gerry back to their home towns. He meets their kids and grandkids. He sees their haunts.

For the majority of the episodes, this show is dating in a vacuum. Contestants have rules about no phones, limited reading, no tv. The show primes the contestants to obsess over their preselected love interest (basically the thing all your friends tell you not to do when you have a crush).

And then here they are, home. Everyone is way more interesting in context!!
Contestant Hope rides horses! Theresa has two sisters that she leans on for advice! Leslie has sweetly protective sons! The conversations each woman has with her family members don’t reveal a lot (mostly it’s “you seem happy, I hope he’s a good guy”) but they do remind you that these women have a lot more dimension than depicted in-season.

The moment they become realer is, ironically, the moment some relationships disintegrate. Suddenly, Gerry has to take a break from the makeout sesh and ask things like “Wait, where would we live if we did this for real?”

Logistics enter the chat, and they’re not here for a love fest. But the logistics are the part I keep thinking about.

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Cat and I are working on a few things together. We dive into logistics quite often. I worry a little bit—will it be bad for our friendship to keep assigning project deadlines to each other? But this very silly tv paired with active work toward our goals gives us multiple contexts to be friends in, and it’s been very fun so far.
The sheer non-impressiveness of bad tv is a helpful foil to our try-hard tendencies.
I recommend.

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Non-Junk

Speaking of what we’re working on, take a look! I’m SO PROUD of the stuff we’ve collaborated on this year:

First: The Downtown Sioux Falls Gift Guide. Speaking of specific context, here’s a place-based one. I wrote a gift guide for my newsletter last year, and this year I got paid to do one for work! Cat took the luxe photos, local businesses supplied the gifts, and I wrote the copy. The real finished product is a print booklet I designed that’s mailed out to 12000 Sioux Falls residents (!!!)

Second: Entertaining Ourselves, the home for our food jokes and tips on elaborately staged dinners. Start with the potato picnic.

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Elsewhere:

"So I ask you: Where are you vulnerable? Where are you exposed? What makes you hurt? Go to that thing. Go to the thing that turns red when you thump it. That’s where your magic is."A great commencement speech by author Harrison Scott Key.

Ghost Rivers: A really great placemaking project that maps rivers that got redirected and/or tunneled under Baltimore.

Very funny candles, of all things. (Someone get me the Boston Tea party candle!)

Might add a ‘now’ page to my website.

The Weird Medieval Guys podcast is perfect. Where else are you going to learn about medieval wife guys??

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That’s it for this month! Friendship is a joy, projects are fun, and breaks to analyze dumb tv are a relief. Thanks for reading, and tell me—what’s your junky time diversion?

🧡, Ten