Good news for fans of reality television, roses, and the general premise of marrying someone you met a few weeks earlier and have only been on three real dates with (to the extent you consider, like, a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon to be “a date”): The Bachelorette is back. This season’s lucky(ish) lady is JoJo, whom you may remember from the last season of The Bachelor for showing up in a dress and unicorn head and eventually getting dumped by a loaf of Wonderbread who had just told her he loved her. The good news is that now she doesn’t have to fight tooth-and-nail with 20-plus mostly unhinged women for a chance at love. (Missin’ u, Lace.) The bad news is that now she has to sort through 20-plus doofy bros for a chance at love.
I think JoJo and host Chris Harrison said it best in the early parts of the show.
JOJO: This is so crazy.
CHRIS HARRISON: It’s insane.
JOJO: So crazy.
Truer words, etc. etc.
And so, without further ado, here are your power rankings for the premiere.
1) Daniel
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Daniel’s listed occupation was “Canadian,” and in the official pre-show bios, he gave multiple answers that referred to his body as “a Lambo.” This was his evening, in bullet point form:
- Introduced himself by referencing the “Damn, Daniel” video, which she didn’t get even after his futile attempt at an explanation, which he attempted to salvage by asking her — a very attractive woman in a formal dress — if she has “been following the internet”
- Drank a lot
- Poked a couple guys in their belly buttons
- Cussed a bunch
- Drank some more
- Took off his clothes
- Flexed
- Jumped in the pool
Daniel got a rose, obviously. You get naked and jump in the pool, you get to come back for another episode, stated marriage-related goal of the show be damned.
2) Alcohol in General
While Daniel’s performance took the rum-soaked cake, he wasn’t the only one who made quite the boozy impression. We also had one (1) contestant show up with a bottle of wine that he started drinking with JoJo sans glass; two (2) stumbling goofs bumble into JoJo’s confessional room thingy in the middle of her interview to woo her with unintelligible promises related to bathroom floors (I think); and this exchange between two contestants, which I might get tattooed across my back later today:
“Cheers, bro.”
“Cheers to rock n’ roll.”
If this season gives us nothing else, it will have been worth it for, “Cheers to rock n’ roll.”
3) Committing to a Bit
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Okay, so the limo introductions at the beginning can go one of two ways: You either go subtle with a little joke or awful pick-up line or you go really, really big. Special shout outs (shouts out?) go to three gentlemen who went with the latter: Nick, the man above who showed up in a full Santa costume; Jonathan, a half-Scottish, half-Chinese guy who showed up in a kilt; and Wells, a radio DJ who showed up with the 1990s R&B group All-4-One.
But just showing up like that is easy. These guys took it a step further by keeping up their bits through the entire episode. Santa guy? Sat around drinking champagne in his suit. Kilt guy? Rocked the kilt up to and including the rose ceremony, which ended with him getting sent home, in a kilt. And All-4-One guy? Dragged All-4-One around with him and made them perform a cappella in the background while he talked to JoJo, which was hilarious because she didn’t even recognize them and referred to them as “an a cappella group” at one point, like they were just some dudes he found in the phone book and not celebrities (“celebrities”) that he got to appear by using his fancy radio connections.
Although… maybe he did just find them in the phone book, actually. Been a tough couple decades for All-4-One.
4) Siblings of NFL MVPs
Your early favorite among the crop of contestants is Jordan, a 27-year-old former football player, whose full name is Jordan Rodgers, who is the younger brother of Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. He did not bring up this last part, and I super, super cannot wait until he does, because I’m picturing a dozen bros immediately circling him and peppering him with questions about his brother and his brother’s girlfriend, Olivia Munn, followed by Jordan having a full-on little brother inferiority meltdown that ends with him pouting and sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the floor in a tuxedo.
5) Unicorns
So remember the thing from earlier about JoJo showing up to her Bachelor season with a unicorn head on? I can’t imagine you forgot. Well, a few of the guys used that to help break the ice a bit, none more so than Luke, who skipped the limo to ride up to the mansion on an actual unicorn (“actual” “unicorn”). Which is fine, I guess, even if it is a bittttttt much. It’s reality television. We can cut the dude some slack.
But it also means at some point prior to the cameras rolling, Luke — or some low-level ABC employee who probably went to USC film school with dreams of becoming Tarantino and can’t believe this is his life now — had to wrangle a horse and affix a horn to its face in an attempt to impress a woman who wore a unicorn mask to her first meeting with a different man she allegedly wanted to marry at some point in the very near future.
Television is fun.
Notable omissions: Evan, an “erectile dysfunction specialist” who said of his job, “It’s a hard business, it’s draining”; Alex the biker marine’s photo of a dog wearing sunglasses; Christian the ninja nerd family man; and singer-songwriter contestant James Taylor, who is not that singer-songwriter James Taylor, which would have been way funnier.
