Data Shows 'The Bachelor's' Race Problem
by EG
The Bachelor continues to struggle with race-related controversy as its host has stepped down after defending a contestant's racially insensitive (at best) past behavior. But are the show's string of racial controversies merely flukes, or do they say something about the franchise's culture? A data-collection effort suggests the latter. The series doesn't seem very committed to putting contestants of color in front of the camera, and when it does happen, fans don't seem to be all that interested. Read on for details.
The producers behind The Bachelor had vowed to do better when it came to diversity and representation on their hit ABC franchise. "We are taking positive steps to expand persity in our cast, in our staff, and most importantly, in the relationships that we show on television,” the executive producers said in the summer of 2020. "We can and will do better to reflect the world around us and show all of its beautiful love stories."
That joint statement came amid the country's racial reckoning and renewed public outcry for The Bachelor franchise to persify its majority white reality television series of nearly 20 years. But eight months later, after a celebrated season of The Bachelorette and with the historic cycle of first Black Bachelor Matt James underway, The Bachelor is once again facing a racism controversy.
How did this happen?
"Casting a diverse set of contestants is one step, but the next is actually showing them,” says Suzana, the longtime viewer who runs @BachelorData. The emerging Instagram account, which launched one year ago, has been regularly cataloguing, in illuminating chart form, on-air disparities for white contestants and contestants of color. As the show's missteps received renewed criticism, the account has helped to spark a dialogue around how screen time impacts representation."My goal is to be able to look at screen time and race representation. What are we seeing on our screens and how are we reacting to it as a society that watches the show?"
Suzana, who wishes to be identified by her first name to maintain privacy, is a technical director for a school district who started manually tracking and analyzing show metrics in her free time, beginning with the 2019 seasons. She and a small but growing team work in spreadsheets that are updated daily with Instagram follower counts and weekly with episode screen time for each current contestant. Recently, they have also begun tracking the tone of the segments to see how cast members are "being leveraged" by the show for different storylines.
"I wanted to learn how to use spreadsheets better," Suzana, who has been tuning into the series since 2010, tells The Hollywood Reporter of what motivated her to begin this venture around The Bachelor franchise. "At the time, nothing sounded worse to me than an Excel class. And I’d always been interested in what happens on the show and really being able to quantify how America reacts to it. So I started tracking Instagram followers for Colton Underwood’s 2019 Bachelor season about two weeks before it started airing and posting about it on Reddit [before launching on Instagram in 2020]. Through that season, I learned different aspects of how to use spreadsheets and then slowly started moving into data visualization."
One of the first trends that Suzana noticed was how social media growth was impacted by a contestant receiving a one-on-one date during an episode. "But Tayshia [Adams, during Colton's season] was the first outlier," she says. "She got a one-on-one date and didn’t stick out in terms of growing in Instagram followers. That was one of the first race-related trends that we were able to point to and that’s really propelled me to keep moving forward with it; finding out ways that I could quantify what’s happening on the show and its viewers and how that all intertwines."
Historically, white contestants on the franchise have a higher following than people of color and "that goes for every single season," she says, having tracked the data to prove it.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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