Posted by
Pat Fish on Monday, March 09, 2009 6:52:31 PM
Whew.
Everyone loved Bachelor 09 Single Dad Jason Mesnick. He was affable, truthful, cute, a fine father…what's not to love?
Except last week he became public enemy #1 for how he handled his choice of a wife.
Scripted, scripted, scripted…and I'll tell you why.
All with pics and video you'll find nowhere else on the Internet.
Pic of the Day
Jason Turns From Cute to Public Enemy Overnight
From mlive.com:
Monday's two-hour season ender was the highest-rated program of the night with 15.45 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. It's the most-watched "Bachelor" finale since November 2003, when Bob Guiney picked Estella Gardinier.
I had no idea this series was so popular! I am a reality show junkee of sorts but The Bachelor has never been anywhere near my fave. “American Idol” will forever hold that title. But the finale of the Jason/Melissa/Molly drama was the highest rated program of the night on Monday, 3/2/09.
They have to work hard to keep up interest like this in a reality series that is a)hard to believe in its premise and b)a little boring, truth be told.
Which brings me to the base of my assertion that this show and its ending was so scripted and by me it was quite obvious.
I shall, as expected, explain.
The concept of The Bachelor/Bachelorette series is that one single person will be given a pool of 25 fine and pretty folk from which to choose their future mate from. It’s not supposed to be a dating game. The show’s script calls for the episodes’ stars to be looking for a mate. To ask an audience to sit through yay many shows so the contender of their affection can get a date is asking too much.
In the early 2009 episode of The Bachelor, we had Jason Mesnick, a cute and physically-fit divorced Dad who has custody of his cute little boy. Jason had been a contender for DeAnna Pappas’ hand in the prior series featuring DeAnna as the Bachelorette seeking a permanent relationship. DeAnna had been rejected herself by the formerly most-hated Bachelor, Brad Womack who, even though he had 25 females vying for him, could not find one worth his fine self. Womack rejected them all!
Jason truly love DeAnna and asked her to marry him. She turned him down for a bowtie-wearing snowboarder, what a hoot. Jason was cute and beloved by the mostly female viewers so he came back to find a replacement for DeAnna who would heal his broken heart.
In fact DeAnna did make a reappearance on this series. Supposedly she wanted Jason back, realizing that a joke-cracking snowboarder was not the stuff of fine husbands. Folks, there really is such a thing as over-exposure. DeAnna needs to move on. Her entire act did not look real at all. DeAnna is no actress. Of course Jason turned her down flat because, read on, Jason had enough problems deciding on his future mate without throwing DeAnna, who’d already rejected him, into the mix.
Up until this season’s finale, Jason came off as intelligent, affable, truthful, pragmatic, kind and gentle.
He chose Melissa, a DeAnna lookalike, for his future wife, telling her he loved her, giving her a beautiful engagement ring and celebrating with her and his son Ty. It left the viewers in tears that this lonely, sweet and cute single Dad, rejected so ruthlessly by publicity hound DeAnna the prior season, finally found someone so cute and loving such as Melissa.
Next came the “After the Rose” show and we knew something was up when show host Chris Harrison told us that the ending we were about to see was so shocking that they did not have an audience on set for the sensitivity required.
I could not imagine how what seemed to have already been a fine and happy finale could have turned so dire.
Jason comes out to greet Chris and he’s got tears in his eyes. “Oh-oh”, the viewer should think.
It would turn out that in the short amount of time since Jason chose Melissa as his future bride that things had gone sour in the relationship. I’m not sure when this series is taped but my guess is in the Fall of 2008, maybe late summer. There needs to be time for around eight to ten episodes, the “ladies’ night”, the big finale, and the “After the Rose” thing. Jason mentioned that he and Melissa spent some of the holidays together, we should assume he meant Christmas 2008.
So hey, it’d only been about three months or so. Melissa is from Dallas and as I understand it, the show paid for Melissa to see Jason every other weekend but this is just scuttlebutt. The thing is, once the Bachelor or Bachelorette pick their mate, they don’t get married the next day. Time is required to arrange moving and such. Or so we are expected to assume.
But Jason not only no longer wanted Melissa, he wanted MOLLY BACK!!
Heh.
Well that’s one of the main stumbling blocks in the show. For here’s a person totally fawned over by a bevy of opposite sex folks, all struggling to win their love and devotion. In real life we kind of stumble upon a potential mate. We must then build a relationship, slowly allowing it to grow to where it will go. In this series it’s no genius to figure out that a person with about a dozen others vying for their affection might not have the patience, forbearance and forgiveness to build a relationship. It’s easy to move on to another dreamer out of the contender pool.
I don’t believe this year’s ending for a second.
The first huge clue here is that we never met Melissa’s parents. Supposedly they had objections to being on a national show about a subject so personal.
I think this whole ending was scripted before this year’s series even began. I think the show’s producers chose a sweet young thing out of the pool of contenders who sort of resembled DeAnna, as the loyal viewers might note.
I think Melissa was given the script as the ending would happen. I think the show’s producers desperately needed a shocking ending to keep audience interest.
Melissa even has a brother! You mean even HE wouldn’t meet Jason and get time in front of the cameras? They did script in a phone call by Jason to Melissa’s parents but you never heard anyone speak a word. Instead Melissa took Jason to meet her “friends”, who I also think were actors, frankly.
What I’m saying here is that Jason chose Molly right along. Melissa had been recruited to act out this “shocking” ending. Jason was maybe given some monetary or reward compensation to go along with being the bad guy at the end. What would he care? He’d have the money and Molly of his dreams.
I don’t think for a minute that any self-respecting woman would agree to go on national TV and get the heave-ho in front of fifteen million people. And not for one minute did Melissa look upset. I think she acted out that ending and she was pretty good at it, frankly.
I’m not mad. Reality shows are almost always scripted on some level. I kind of enjoy finding the scripted parts, it’s part of the allure.
Melissa’s getting something out of this, exposure perhaps, to a future in acting or such. It would not do to have her parents or brother on the show because they’d have to ACT too. That would have been too much to pull over on the viewers.
It’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
For posterity, a remix of the highlights of the finale of Bachelor 2009 below.