Spoiler Nation
Matt James's season of "The Bachelor" has been spoiled, in every sense of the word.
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Matt James’s season of “The Bachelor.”
On Monday, Matt James released a statement on his social media addressing the revelations about Rachael Kirkconnell, one of the three women who is advancing to the fantasy suite dates after this week’s episode, and the shocking “Extra” interview in which host Chris Harrison talked over, condescended to, and dismissed Rachel Lindsay as she tried to explain the racist implications of Kirkconnell’s attendance at an antebellum-themed formal in 2018.
For a reigning Bachelor, the statement was very strongly worded; he openly criticized the show for its failures in handling race and racism and strongly hinted that these failures had caused him to consider his own journey, so recently concluded, in a new light. This season is drawing inexorably to its conclusion, but it’s clear that very public, very current events have already intruded on the story the franchise is telling us.
I came to “The Bachelor” as a fan, and began covering it in that spirit. From its inception, our podcast aimed to critique the show, but critique has always been one way I show my genuine enjoyment and affection. (Pity my loved ones.) It wasn’t, in other words, a journalistic subject for me. I didn’t want to know all the off-screen dirt about the franchise stars, and I definitely didn’t want to know spoilers. For the fairy tale onscreen to unfold as neatly as a ship in a bottle, an immaculate creation unfurling behind the glass, I needed to remain as ignorant of the conclusion as if it hadn’t happened yet.
But that was almost a decade ago. As I began to recap the show, with each season it seemed to grow harder to stay unspoiled. In part, that was because people would tweet spoilers at us, or because we’d stumble across them while perusing Reality Steve for other important scuttlebutt. It went deeper than that, though. With all the information that’s now out there about “Bachelor” contestants, avoiding spoilers meant potentially looking away from troubling revelations about current cast members. These people were on social media, tweeting and growing huge Instagram followings throughout their runs on ABC — some of them building lucrative platforms on the basis of their desirable on-screen image. Internet sleuths would uncover allegations of assault, racist tweets, and other horrifying revelations about season favorites, and the lead’s reaction to them onscreen would already seem invalidated by the dramatic irony. What would they really think of that person — into whose kiss they were melting on our TVs — if they knew what we, the viewers, knew? It grew increasingly impossible to treat their love stories as perfect, untouchable little fantasies.
This week, Emma and I reported on what actually happens at the end of this season. It’s obviously not the first time we’ve been spoiled, and it’s not even the first time that it became necessary for us to spoil ourselves — and readers — because of evidence that a frontrunner for the lead’s heart had liked racist and bigoted content on social media. Here’s our piece, which reveals how the season ends and new information about Matt’s relationship post-show. It also contains insight from a source close to Matt, who underscores what his statement hinted: That the first Black Bachelor feels let down and even exploited by the franchise after the events of his season.
It’s heartbreaking and enraging that Matt has had to experience this betrayal and hurt from a franchise that claimed it wanted to guide him on an idyllic journey to love. Instead they’ve used him as a shield to protect a white heteronormative fantasy narrative that is inherently harmful.
The question of spoilers is a small one, next to all these others — including the devastating way in which Matt’s own experience was spoiled. But it unsettles me nonetheless. Remaining “unspoiled,” as I might have once said, meant that I didn’t know how the season ended. Wanting to be unspoiled also, on a literal level, means wanting to be pure. It meant I wanted to examine the show as a discrete text; I wanted to be emotionally and mentally unburdened by the complications of the real people behind the slick narrative presented by the show.
With the resurgence of true crime and prestige docuseries as genres, alongside the continued popularity of reality TV, the “no spoilers” refrain has come to be applied with unsettling frequency to actual events from history. We don’t want to know what really happened in Chernobyl or the O.J. Simpson murder trial or to the people falling in love on our TVs — knowing the truth would ruin our pleasure in finding out at the right beat of the TV show we’re watching about it. When I think of it this way, I squirm. What right do I have to close my eyes to reality so that I can consume it later, like it’s entertainment?
With “The Bachelor” in particular, I still crave the spoiler-free viewing. What I’m craving, though, is something fake and rotten: The magical ship-in-a-bottle love story between two camera-ready people who don’t need to know anything about each other except how good they look in formalwear and whether they’re fun to rappel down a skyscraper with. Political beliefs matter. Real-world context matters. Watching Matt’s season crumble, it’s undeniable. To grapple with what’s wrong with the franchise, we have to spoil it.