FOR_1018_FLEISS_ALT_REAL_408_NIGHT 9/25/18 6:23 PM Page 2
50 TV FORMATS
and then meeting the families and then overnight dates and then the finale. When I sold the show at first, it was only six one-hours. So the beats were: [introductions on] night one, group dates and single dates in episode two, mostly oneon-one dates in episode three, episode four was the hometowns and episode five was the overnight date and then episode six was the finale. So when I was treating it as a sixepisode arc, those beats were just natural. The first night is the first date, the finale is the finale, two and three had random dating stuff and the rest was much more structured. Now that we do 22 hours, there’s a lot more of everything. TV FORMATS: It seems like such a simple, clever idea—why do you think it was so hard to sell at first? FLEISS: You say people look at this as something that has the natural structure as a format, but people fought me on that initially. They thought, How the hell are you going to get one guy to go through all those dates? Is it speed dating? No one wants to watch that. I said, No, no, no! It’s going to be marathon dating. You’re going to go on one date and then another one. People talk about good formats being simple and repeatable. Even my own studio, Warner Bros., didn’t see this as simple and repeatable. They liked formats like Love Connection in this space. I thought ultimately this would become very repeatable. TV FORMATS: Has the casting approach changed over the years? FLEISS: I don’t think it’s changed too much. We still want sexy and sincere. That’s my Aaron Spelling-derived mantra,
By Mansha Daswani
Dating shows have been a television staple since the 1960s, but none have redefined and reinvigorated the genre more than The Bachelor. Created by Mike Fleiss, the show has been a mainstay of the ABC schedule since 2002 and has spawned a number of hit spin-offs, among them The Bachelorette, Bachelor in Paradise and The Bachelor Winter Games. And the concept has not only taken hold in the U.S.; Warner Bros. International Television Production has rolled the format out to a slew of international markets, among them the U.K.— where The Bachelor is returning to Channel 5 after a seven-year hiatus—Australia, Canada, France, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam and more. Fleiss tells TV Formats about how the show has evolved and weighs in on why it’s become a pop-culture phenomenon. TV FORMATS: How did you craft the pillars of The Bachelor that ultimately made it such a compelling and adaptable format for broadcasters across the globe? FLEISS: [In the U.S.] it didn’t sell right away. I took it everywhere, everybody passed. It took a year and a half to get someone to agree to do it and then that network passed. So in round two, I took it back [to ABC]. I wanted to mirror the stages of an actual relationship: first impression, first date, more romance down the road, then some physical connection
first sexy, then sincere, or sincere, then sexy. Do we always get that? No, but we’re always looking for it, not just in the lead but in the 25 [love interests] as well. It’s not the casting that has changed; it’s the cast. The advent of social media and its dominance in culture today has changed the way young people—I can say that now, I’ve been doing it for so long!— approach the show. They’re so much more comfortable in front of the camera and exposing their potentially vulnerable side. From a sociological standpoint that’s been the most fascinating thing to watch. In season one it felt impossible. Nobody understood what we were doing. “Why would I do [a show like this]? It’s so humiliating.” It was really, really hard to find the right kind of people to be on the show the first time. Now we have 600 people show up to an open casting in Illinois! So the casting is different in that we’re sifting through a lot more applicants than we did before. TV FORMATS: Talk about the evolution of the franchise, from The Bachelorette onwards. FLEISS: The Bachelorette was a back-channel promise to ABC so we could mitigate some of the cries of misogyny in The Bachelor format. It was always part of the plan if the
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