On March 25, 2002, The TV show The Bachelor aired for the first time on television. On March 25, 1995, seven years prior to the airing of The Bachelor, the original bachelor, a farmer from southeast Nebraska in a small town called Auburn, married a beautiful girl from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Before there was ever a Bachelor TV show, this farmer had a life-changing real-life experience that is very similar to The Bachelor. This book will make you feel good again about love, marriage, and living the good life. This is a true story of how a farmer had a wild thought come into his mind and changed it into a big decision that would affect him for the rest of his life. This farmer took a big chance in life, and it paid off with big dividends. If you like romance, happy endings, good stories, have a good sense of humor, and want to know that there is hope out there for you, then you must read this book! This book will make you feel good about life again. This book will capture your attention because it is a story of many twists and turns with life lessons that are of value to everyone.

*A New York Times Bestseller* The first definitive, unauthorized, behind-the-scenes cultural history of the Bachelor franchise, America’s favorite guilty pleasure. For sixteen years and thirty-six seasons, the Bachelor franchise has been a mainstay in American TV viewers’ lives. Since it premiered in 2002, the show’s popularity and relevance have only grown—more than eight million viewers tuned in to see the conclusion of the most recent season of The Bachelor. Los Angeles Times journalist Amy Kaufman is a proud member of Bachelor Nation and has a long history with the franchise—ABC even banned her from attending show events after her coverage of the program got a little too real for its liking. She has interviewed dozens of producers, contestants, and celebrity fans to give readers never-before-told details of the show’s inner workings: what it’s like to be trapped in the mansion “bubble”; dark, juicy tales of producer manipulation; and revelations about the alcohol-fueled debauchery that occurs long before the Fantasy Suite. Kaufman also explores what our fascination means, culturally: what the show says about the way we view so-called ideal suitors; our subconscious yearning for fairy-tale romance; and how this enduring television show has shaped society’s feelings about love, marriage, and feminism by appealing to a marriage plot that’s as old as the best of Jane Austen.

Matt James, the first Black bachelor on ABC’s beloved television show, The Bachelor, shares his views on the controversial topics that defined his season and confronts matters of race, opportunity, and his biracial identity head on. When The Bachelor franchise announced Matt James as the first Black lead, it was celebrated as long-overdue progress on the primetime show. America fell in love with Matt—the Christian, former NFL athlete, and nonprofit CEO—who charmed millions of viewers each week. But the off-screen conversations around the show revealed the realities and inescapable challenges of being Black in America and the depth of racism that still exists. On the show, Matt could only go so far in sharing his own story with America. In First Impressions, Matt shares his views on controversial topics like race and opportunity that defined his season on The Bachelor. Matt lives at the intersection of these important issues and shares the wisdom his experience has granted him. Matt describes the joys and difficulties of being the youngest of two Black sons, raised by a single, working-class, white mother in Raleigh, North Carolina. He elaborates on the spiritual closeness and sense of duty he felt for his mother, but also the complex relationships he had with the many male figures in his life: his prejudiced, Italian grandfather, who had trouble accepting Matt as his own; his father, whose womanizing and petty crime put strain on the family; and his older brother, who was Matt’s protector in youth, but who struggled with the long shadow of their father’s legacy. Simultaneously inspirational and informative, First Impressions will leave readers with a deeper understanding of the life experiences that prepared Matt for such a divisive moment in television history.

The right reasons to fall in love with The Bachelor When it debuted in 2002, The Bachelor raised the stakes of first-wave reality television, offering the ultimate prize: true love. Since then, thrice yearly, dozens of camera-ready young-and-eligibles have vied for affection (and roses) in front of a devoted audience of millions. In this funny, insightful examination of the world’s favorite romance-factory, Suzannah Showler explores the contradictions that are key to the franchise’s genius, longevity, and power and parses what this means for both modern love and modern America. She argues the show is both gameshow and marriage plot — an improbable combination of competitive effort and kismet — and that it’s both relic and prophet, a time-traveler from first-gen reality TV that proved to be a harbinger of Tinder. In the modern media-savvy climate, the show cleverly highlights and resists its own artifice, allowing Bachelor Nation to see through the fakery to feel the romance. Taking on issues of sex, race, contestants-as-villains, the controversial spin-offs, and more, Most Dramatic Ever is both love letter to and deconstruction of the show that brought us real love in the reality TV era.

Perfect for fans of Bachelor Nation and Seinfeldia, an illuminating deep dive into the most successful reality TV franchise of all time—The Bachelor. Since its premiere in 2002, ABC’s The Bachelor has become a staple of American television. Now, discover the fascinating history of the show, uncover the ins and outs of the phenomenon that has become Bachelor Nation, and take a deeper look at what separates the winners from the losers. From how best to exit the limo on Night One, to strategies for making a run for the all-important First Impression Rose, to how to avoid being labeled a villain, this clear-eyed guide illustrates the rules and strategies any would-be contestant should know. The ultimate must-read for every fan, How to Win the Bachelor gives you an “entertaining” (Publishers Weekly) inside look at the franchise where The Rose holds all the power.

This is the true story of a thirty-something single man in New York. A man who is employed, decent, and horny. A man hilariously combing his way through women in search of one who will make him stop searching. . . For the last four years, "This Dating Life" columnist Ron Geraci has chronicled his romantic (mis)adventures in the pages of Men's Health, offering readers a no-holds-barred look into one man's bare-naked dating life. His mission was simple: he dated whomever he could find in order to fill that month's dispatch and revealed everything--the good and bad, funny and catastrophic, triumphant and painful. The Bachelor Chronicles is Geraci's hilariously frank confession of his wild ride from struggling writer in the frenzied world of magazine journalism to his rise as the "male Carrie Bradshaw" with the scars to prove it. From the women he maniacally dated (lots) to the ones he enraged (even more) and enthralled (okay, you win some), Geraci's story careens through an insane New York City landscape that includes countless prospects, one lesbian, two therapists, a high-priced matchmaker, possible liposuction, incredible and not-so-incredible-but-at-least-frequent sex, dating addiction, destroyed relationships as an occupational hazard, blossoming alcoholism, porn, waking up in apartments where no sane man should find himself, perverse mating schemes, noble motivations, desperate loneliness, and the near-constant yearning for a stable life with one woman. Part cautionary tale, part dating survival guide, The Bachelor Chronicles is an emotionally naked, frequently hilarious peek into the male mind and modern romance by a guy honest enough to tell it like it is.

Rachel E. Dubrofsky examines the reality TV series The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in one of the first book-length feminist analysis of the reality TV genre. The research found in The Surveillance of Women on Reality TV: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette meets the growing need for scholarship on the reality genre. This book asks us to be attentive to how the surveillance context of the program impacts gendered and racialized bodies. Dubrofsky takes up issues that cut across the U.S. cultural landscape: the use of surveillance in the creation of entertainment products, the proliferation of public confession and its configuration as a therapeutic tool, the ways in which women's displays of emotion are shown on television, the changing face of popular feminist discourse (notions of choice and empowerment), and the recentering of whiteness in popular media.