Gather round, children, and I will tell you of a dark time. A cruel time.
It was a time when reality dating shows were even worse than they are now.
Little remains of what was once a rich tapestry of such programming, if by “rich” you mean “smelly” and by “tapestry” you mean “garbage heap.” Back in the day, Joe Millionaire featured a poor guy posing as a rich guy. Married By America resulted in nobody getting married. Monica Lewinsky hosted a show called Mr. Personality where the guys wore masks. Average Joe ended with a climactic twist where the woman confessed the terrible secret that she had once dated Fabio. (True story. True story.) Love Cruise and Temptation Island and Paradise Hotel and Eden Something Something all gave people opportunities to walk around in bikinis and dream the ultimate dream: of one day being able to get into a sweaty nightclub populated by other reality-show refugees on a Friday night.
Gradually, like a surging tide of fetid water with rotted fish floating in it, this particular fad slowly faded. All that was left of this era, the single gleaming salmon judged marginally safe to eat, was The Bachelor franchise, which totters along drunkenly, both figuratively and literally, as its participants engage in a sort of premarital trial by combat in which the prize is a bland and/or terrible person delivered to you, caked in makeup, on a silver tray made of the internet.
But with summer approaching, Fox has decided to revisit that terrible old time, much as one might decide to become a historical reenactor specializing in plagues of locusts, with I Wanna Marry ‘Harry,’ a show that posits that women stupid enough to believe that Prince Harry is trying to find a wife on a Fox reality show are nevertheless interesting enough to treat as humans rather than props. We are told that he is just Matt, an average guy, but the women are led to believe he is Prince Harry.