Rival dating shows offer a more diverse alternative to 'The Bachelor'
A strong jawline and a win on the second group date weren’t quite enough to earn Grant Kemp a rose from JoJo Fletcher on last week’s episode of The Bachelorette. The firefighter from the San Francisco area didn’t have as strong of a connection with the southern beauty as the eight white men who were left — a familiar refrain for most black contestants on every season of the 14-year-old franchise.
In 32 editions of ABC's The Bachelor and The Bachelorette (Mondays, 9 ET/PT), there has never been a black star, and few suitors have made it past the fourth or fifth episode. New Bachelors and Bachelorettes are almost always chosen from the front-runners of the previous edition, so with Kemp’s departure, ABC is not likely to change the racial equation next season. (The Bachelor cast one Hispanic lead, Juan-Pablo Galavis, in 2014, but he drew negative attention when he called gay people "perverts.")
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Though it’s still a ratings juggernaut, winning Monday nights,the show’s overwhelmingly white cast has created an opening for other networks, including VH1, Lifetime and WEtv, to court a frustrated fan base.
Dating Naked, VH1's stripped-down version of a dating competition show, returns for a third season Wednesday (9 ET/PT) with its first black main dater. David and his counterpart, Natalie, will look for love through a series of dates that, as the name implies, are sans clothes and pretense.
WEtv has also capitalized with Match Made in Heaven (Thursdays,10 ET/PT) which follows a more standard dating competition structure but adds a spiritual guide and live-in potential mother-in-law.
“It was a very strategic move; we’re always looking at how to tell stories with unique and different characters that really represent the diversity of our audience,” says the network's president, Marc Juris, who paired it with another diverse reality series, Braxton Family Values. Ratings have doubled, to 600,000 viewers, from last season, though its audience is still tiny by Bachelor standards.
Recruiting new host and mentor Sherri Shepherd, known on the show as “Sherri Godmother,” may have helped.
“My first thought was no, they are a guilty pleasure, I’m not into anything crazy,” Shepherd laughs. Then she remembered her indignation discussing The Bachelor with her View co-stars Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg.
“They have contestants, they have a couple black people. Just like in a horror movie they get rid of them early on," Shepherd says. "I was like, ‘I just don’t understand how this show has gone maybe 15 seasons with no diversity in casting’,” she says. “In this day and age, you can’t find one successful black woman to find love?”
She and Heaven producers found a bachelor, anyway: Entrepreneur and former pro football player Stevie Baggs, with contestants who are mostly black, with a few advanced degrees balancing the standard model/actresses.
Lifetime has similarly found success exploiting some of the weaknesses of reality dating shows with its breakout drama UnREAL, a behind-the-scenes look at Everlasting, a fictional dating series. UnREAL has been a critical hit, gaining buzz in its second season (Mondays, 10 ET/PT) which includes a black “suitor,” who's also a football player.
While the partying athlete serves as poignant commentary, Juris says Match's work with Baggs had little to do with any pro-athlete glamour.
“We want the guy everyone wants to marry,” Juris says. Because at the end of the day, no matter race or profession, “everyone is looking for love.”