I may be underestimating the taste, intelligence and integrity of the American populace but, on the surface, The Bachelor Pad should be the most popular reality show on TV. It has everything reality TV fans love; sex, fighting, stupid immunity challenges, ungodly amounts of fake drama, phoney tans and real sex among a cast of super hot people who spend most of their time in exotic locations wearing as little as possible.
With these elements alone, The Bachelor Pad should be the top show in the country. But the series creators didn’t stop there. To amp the drama of season two of The Bachelor Pad, the producers booked a former Bachelor couple, Jake Pavelka and Vienna Girardi, who famously and angrily broke up on a Bachelor reunion show, to live together and compete against each other.
Oh and by the way, Vienna is bringing her new boyfriend Casey, a former Bachelorette contestant, and all three will live together in the famous Bachelor/Bachelorette mansion along with the 15 other contestants who lie, cheat, and mack on each other while greedily competing for a grand prize of 250 thousand dollars.
The three hour premiere of The Bachelor Pad bursts with bikinis, abs, making out and just outright sex; there is literally a night vision camera over the bed of one of the couples in the season premiere. Add in the classic elements of reality TV like bickering, scheming for votes and a ludicrous immunity challenge that requires couples to be wrapped around each other while suspended over beds and you have a recipe for reality TV gold.
I want to sit here and condemn The Bachelor Pad for being a show about greedy, sexy, morons and propagating the worst qualities of our culture but I have to be honest. About half way through the show, I pressed pause so I could get a soda and make some popcorn. At that point I stopped being the high minded cultural critic I promised to be and became just as bad as every other rubber necker staring down this train wreck of sex and money grubbing.
The Bachelor Pad makes The Bachelor and The Bachelorette look like a scholarly social science experiment in comparison. The contestants are nasty and greedy and not above using sex as a means to get what they want. It really and truly is awful but I really and truly could not stop watching it.
The three hour premiere of The Bachelor Pad airs on ABC on Monday, August 8th 2011 at 8 PM ET, 9 PM CT.