There are only two good sports in the world. One is that awesome handball thing from the Olympics. The other is The Bachelor, a show that features 30 women competing to gain as many Instagram followers as they can before they’re eliminated by a slightly above-average guy who once got dumped on national television. This year is the best yet, because the Bachelor, Nick Viall, got dumped on The Bachelorette … twice! Every Tuesday we’ll be telling you who, uh, rose to the occasion on the previous night’s episode. So read on, but only if you’re reading for the right reasons.
Five Best Corinne Quotes
The past few weeks I’ve given out a Most Valuable Player award to the week’s best contestant. But after giving it to Corinne twice in a row, I have to retire it, because, well, it’s going to be Corinne until she’s off the show.
This was probably her best week yet. Imagine thinking this is actually a show about Nick, who spends this week showing girls around his middle-America hometown while Corinne asks the other women to confront her personally rather than talk behind her back, then refers to being confronted personally as an “attack,” and then literally threatens to punch somebody in the face, which is … the definition of an attack.
Here are Corinne’s best quotes:
5. “Do you call this immature?”
She yells this while grabbing her boobs. Whenever I want to prove my maturity, I clench a part of my body and start screaming.
4. “Thank God I didn’t wear designer today.”
Since they’re in Wisconsin, there’s a date on a dairy farm in this episode. Everybody has to shovel cow poop — we’ll get to that — and this doesn’t go over well with Corinne, who has a live-in nanny to wash her clothes, make her bed, cut her cucumbers, and make her cheesy pasta. The silver lining is that she doesn’t wear her designer heels on the date.
I can’t even respect this incredible brag. A truly respectable rich person would wear designer heels while shoveling crap and then write rap lyrics about it:. “Hit the farm had to shovel up some poopy / time to bust out my dookie-scoopin’ Gucci / better watch out and check where you’re doody’s gone / you almost shoveled crap over my girl’s new Louboutins.”
(Sidenote: If I were an actual rich person, I’d probably write better rhymes about being a rich person.)
3. “Michael Jordan took naps. Abraham Lincoln took naps. And I’m in trouble for napping?”
The greatest basketball player. The greatest president. The greatest Bachelor contestant. All united in their passion for semi-sleep.
It’s also worth noting that Corinne describes one of her naps as “a panic attack,” continuing a Bachelor tradition of referring to pretty much any nonstandard activity as a panic attack.
2. When she says poop a lot.
In case you can’t tell, I just like the word “poop.”
1. “I’m not privileged in any way, shape, or form.”
When Corinne said she wasn’t privileged, I went and bought a dictionary just so I could bring it home and throw it out the window of my apartment.
Greatest Lie, Non-Corinne Edition: Every Girl Being Excited by a Trip to Milwaukee in October
I like Wisconsin. I like people from Wisconsin, I like Culver’s cheese curds, I like Leinenkugel’s Honey Weiss. I even like that y’all say “bubbler” when people from every other place say “water fountain” because, you know, they’re water fountains.
But if I’m on a show that routinely travels to sexy, exotic locales, and the first place I get dragged to is Milwaukee, I’m going to be pissed. Especially considering this show is filmed in the late fall.
It seems to be raining the entire time they’re there. Look! A beach! On a lake, I think!
Technically, they don’t even go to Milwaukee, but rather Nick’s hometown of Waukesha, a suburb, and one of Wisconsin’s top five places starting with “Wau.” (My personal power rankings, on names alone: Wauwatosa, Waupaca, Wausau, Waukesha, Waupun. I hope this list doesn’t start any Waus.) (That last joke was, in itself, a Waupun.)
Least Valuable Player: Taylor
Taylor gets into it with Corrine, and that should’ve made her the episode MVP. But instead of confronting Corinne about the 37,000 obviously objectionable things about Corinne, Taylor chooses to psychoanalyze Corinne using her background as a mental health counselor. I swear, she was two sentences away from explaining the concepts of id, ego, and superego, as if Corinne were a receptive patient interested in critical self-analysis and not a drunk reality TV contestant.
But while Corinne is a selfish, entitled, hypocritical jerk with no capacity for empathy or practical life skills, Taylor proves herself to be something worse: a 23-year-old with a degree who really wants to talk about her degree. I remember graduating and thinking the world should treat me like Woodward and Bernstein’s love child due to my incredible journalistic ethics and knowledge … and then I realized everybody would like me a lot more if I made funny comments about The Bachelor. Young people can change the world; young people who think everybody needs to hear the stuff they just read about in Comparative Psych need to chill out for a bit before trying to change the world.
Most Dangerous Date: Raven
Raven and Nick go roller-skating at a roller rink. Neat!
Then they go on a date to the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is a building with literal wings that every cultured person I’ve ever met from Milwaukee has wanted to talk about for at least 20 minutes.
Then THEY ROLLER-SKATE INSIDE THE ART MUSEUM NO NO NO NO STOP THIS NOW.
I don’t like heights, but I’ll BASE jump before I roller-skate around a museum. I can’t visit a museum without the fear that I’m going to suddenly trip and destroy a Degas with my face and wind up $37 million in debt, forced to spend the rest of my life in indentured servitude. And y’all are roller-skating? Some ancient idiots like y’all are probably why the Venus de Milo’s got no arms.
Least Successful Innuendo: The Thing With the Cow
On the farm date — which was extremely good — Nick attempts to milk a cow and fails. Clearly, he has never read the instructions for how to make milk:
Anyway, this leads to Jami jokingly criticizing Nick, saying she’s upset by the fact that he can’t “handle a teat.” Because udders are the, uh, cow-nterparts to human breasts, and if Nick doesn’t know what to do with an udder, he might not know what to do with a breast.
Most Boring Participant: Nick
This episode is in Nick’s hometown, so a lot of it focuses around his history. He spends his entire date with Danielle L. walking around the town, telling her about where he hooked up with girls and other, more thrilling tales.
Just a reminder: Nick is so much older than all the contestants that he literally wants to tell them stories about how much money was worth back in his day.
At one point, Nick walks past a coffee shop and spots an ex of his inside. What a surprise! It had to have been totally spontaneous. There’s absolutely no way the show could have found somebody Nick had previously hooked up with and persuaded her to appear on the show — well, except for that time the show found somebody Nick previously hooked up with and persuaded her to appear on the show.
The ex tells us nice things about Nick, which I guess is supposed to override the bad things we’ve gleaned from the first five “exes” of Nick’s we’ve met on television — by my count, Andi and Kaitlyn from previous seasons of The Bachelorette, Amanda and Jennifer from Bachelor in Paradise, and Liz from earlier this season.
A visit to a hometown is supposed to provide a little bit of flavor and backstory to the Bachelor. But the backstory the show presents of Nick is kind of a boring one — he’s a small-town boy who once dated a small-town girl and who loves his large family! It isn’t particularly convincing, considering we’ve seen Nick be kind of a jerk on multiple seasons of this show. Personally, I’m more interested in watching that Nick.
Least Promising Relationship: Danielle L.
After the Nick’s Assorted Makeout Sessions Walking Tour of downtown Waukesha, Nick surprises Danielle L. by taking her into a packed theater where Chris Lane, a musician I have never heard of, is performing. They proceed to make out on stage, because that is now what they do. Last episode, Nick and Danielle made out onstage at a Backstreet Boys concert.
Maybe Nick has a weirdly specific fetish for hooking up onstage at concerts and wants to test the scenario out on Danielle, his favorite contestant. Maybe Nick and Danielle have nothing in common, and can find romance only when a semi-popular musical act is performing in front of several hundred paid spectators.
Either way, they’re doomed. This is a completely infeasible pattern for romance. The best-case scenario is they fall in love, get married, and have a few great years making out onstage together — but fast-forward 20 years.
Danielle comes home from work.
“Where’s the car?” she asks.
Nick, now 57 years old, holds out two pieces of paper. “Look, babe. Plane tickets to Branson, Missouri. Darius Rucker’s gonna let us snuggle onstage.”
“Where’s the car?” she asks.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nick replies. “We’re gonna kiss in front of Hootie, like it’s 2018 all over again.”
“Where’s the car?” she asks. And when he starts to cry, she realizes how he paid for the tickets.
Most Troubling Development: The Fragile State of the Viall Clan
You might remember Nick’s youngest sister, Bella, from the season premiere, when she gave him tips for what to do on the show. Today, she plays soccer — and seems significantly larger and better at soccer than all the other children, but whatever. She also goes to the roller rink with Nick and Raven. She’s great! What a trooper!
But now I’m worried. A big subplot of last season of The Bachelorette was the frayed relationship between famous QB Aaron Rodgers and not-so-famous QB Jordan Rodgers, who ended up winning the show.
At first I thought the Jordan-Aaron feud was one made up by The Bachelorette’s producers. He must’ve not appeared on the show because superstar quarterbacks have all kinds of stuff going on. But thanks to the twists and turns of the current season of another popular reality show, The National Football League, we’ve learned there’s more to the story. Aaron really doesn’t interact with Jordan, or his other brother, Luke, or his parents. He won’t even open their presents!
Nick is the oldest of 11 kids, and yet we only meet little Bella. That means he has nine siblings who apparently didn’t want to appear on TV. After the Jordan-Aaron saga unfolded, I’m forced to believe Nick is not on speaking terms with anyone other than Bella. It’s a true American tragedy.