Another year, another Bachelor. Natasha Frost goes all in on the first two episodes from the new season.
Our hero, Jordan Mauger. Photo: The Bachelor NZ
Conditions for true love are perfect.
A borrowed mansion, a series of almost identical glittery party frocks, Mike Puru’s teeth glowing blue-white in the moonlight. This year, the stakes are higher - you can tell because the champagne flutes are made out of glass.
It is incredible that the producers of The Bachelor have found 23 young New Zealand women who think their best shot at love is a marginally less lethal version of the Hunger Games - but find them they have, and they’re as keen as bloody mustard. (I blame the man drought.)
“These girls have sacrificed a lot to be here,” says our hero, Jordan (Their image? Their summer holiday? A fatted calf?), as he looks moodily into the mid-distance.
One by one, looking almost uncannily like a dressed version of this NSFW ‘80s fashion photograph they march forwards from the courtesy car, with glassy resolve in their eyes and steel in their smiles. Their breasts are pneumatic. They will not be stopped. They are coming.
"He could definitely be my future husband... I think," says one. Another hands over a red plush effigy of her heart, which Jordan tucks a little anxiously into his breast pocket. Have we all been doing romance wrong?
This season’s rash of bachelorettes tend towards the tall and blonde - in some cases towering over Jordan Mauger (whose acting profile claims, optimistically, that he’s 183cm). They have big dreams and even bigger smiles.
Jordan, like no other man before him, likes cars and films, and is devilishly handsome in a way that suggests he has broken his nose at least once. He uses words like "chinwag" and "switcheroo", which I like, and proves himself to be comfortable in a variety of underwater montage settings over the course of the first two episodes - the shower, the other shower, the swimming pool. We’re off to a great start.
My own heart, by the end of the first episode, goes out to Harmony, who couldn’t - or perhaps wouldn’t - remember the Bachelor’s name (Jacob?), got sloshed on the free bubbles, and chucked a cushion furiously into the pool for reasons I didn’t wholly understand. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Good on ya.
Naz: 'The bad one' Photo: The Bachelor NZ
Come episode two, a bevy of the blondes are also tested on their ability to cope in an aqueous setting - hairdresser Sarah is treated to some ‘one on one’ time on a wakeboard (“She struggles, and she struggles, and she struggles…” says Jordan, who puts her out of her misery with a small kiss and some smushed Kapiti ice-cream up the Sky Tower.)
On the group date, the other blondes - and Storm - are put through their paces at beach-volleyball. The one who is best at swimming, lovely Dutch Fleur, wins some more alone time. It’s like school Swimming Sports Day, but with a human prize.
Meanwhile, the ‘ethnic ones’ (thanks, Twitter) - or brunettes - get stuck on Evil Island, where they worry, charitably, that some of the other girls may be there for the wrong reasons. Jordan must be warned!
Naz, from Christchurch, is almost cartoonishly villainous. “First Sarah gets the rose, then Rebecca gets the rose … I just don’t… agree,” she says, before proclaiming them “not real” and undeserving of Jordan’s time. If you didn’t pick up that she’s the ‘bad one’, there’s a handy soundtrack of serial killer strings, screeching gears and slashing blades.
In her quest to find true love, like #feminist heroes Margaret Thatcher and Taylor Swift before her, Naz will go wherever she must and do whatever it takes. And - whether it’s thanks to a nudge from the producers (she does make excellent viewing, after all), or a genuine spark that missed out in the editing process, it wins her one of the first roses.
But maybe my favourite thing about the Bachelor is his commitment, like Art Green before him, to pretending to have planned the dates. It’s very sweet, and very disingenuous - and surely would put the producers out of a job.
Mind you, with his own background in film and television production, perhaps they’ve cut costs and got him to give them a hand with this bit. It would certainly explain where the budget for those glass champagne flutes has come from.
Going home: Harmony, Freya, Catherine, Emily-Rose
Pick to win: Rebecca
Single Date: Sarah, Storm, Anna, Fleur, other blondes I can’t remember
In trouble: Naz - but you can’t fault her for trying. And trying. And trying.
