‘The Bachelorette’ review: Did show handle Eric Hill’s death with Andi Dorfman appropriately?
We know that tonight’s episode of “The Bachelorette” was hometown dates, and that really should have been the main event for the story. We much prefer writing about those stories, since the show makes it so easy to be cynical about these poor family members herded together to dote over someone dating other people.
However, we cannot really keep ourselves from not feeling so conflicted over what we saw tonight with how the producers handled Eric Hill’s death. First of all, we don’t deny for one second that Chris Harrison was being sincere with these guys and with Andi Dorfman. This is probably the hardest news that he has ever had to deliver on the show, and we sympathize with him. We also feel for the guys especially, who knew Eric much more than Andi even did, given the amount of time that he was in the house with him.
It was curious in the way of details that the moment happened at Harrison’s supposed home, given that we are not quite sure that this has been done on the show before. To us, that was the team trying to make things as personal as they can, and not throw them in a hyper-intense environment.
This is what we keep coming back to: Was it necessarily for us to see it? The emotions were raw and we suppose it was “shocking” TV, but it also felt a little too forced, like the camera crew wanted us to see distraught faces and Andi unable to continue a rose ceremony. This show is about something that is serious in love, but they do push that whole “fairy tale” aspect of it hard. This was a railroading of the real world into the show, and it may have been more effective to give everyone time to grieve and collect their thoughts off-camera before having to talk about it on the show. We do feel like it was important to address it on the program itself, mostly for the sole reason that Eric did mean a lot to these guys, and this is the sort of thing that would effect you, even if you hardly knew the guy.
We know that there will be many opinions on how the show and the editors handled this tonight, so we’re interested to see them come in. We will say that we at least appreciated Andi trying to walk away from the cameras at first, and we do feel like the hearts of the people on-camera were in the right place. Also, seeing the crew members step out was a nice reminder that these are real people behind the show, and not just robots there to work to tell a story.
As for the rest of the episode itself, it was obvious that Marcus had the worst date. We hated the striptease the first time, and doing it again felt superficial and uncomfortable. There wasn’t much drama on the night when it comes to this; instead, most of that will be reserved for something else that will be talked about and debated through the end of the series. Grade: C- (though it does feel weird to grade the episode at all, though it is our job to do so).
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Photo: ABC