Chris Harrison explains why there will be no gay ‘Bachelor’
Has Chris Harrison just opened up the same “Bachelor” can of worms that Juan Pablo Galavis did earlier this season in regards to having a gay star on the show. We don’t quite see it that way. What the show’s host did manage to do in a new interview is speak with a great deal of candor and honesty, and the only thing that surprised us is that he made a bizarre analogy between the sexuality of someone and serving a different sort of food product.
Harrison’s comments come in a new interview in the New York Times, where he explained that the reason there is not likely to ever be a same-sex Bachelor is simply because from a business standpoint, the formula that the show uses works:
“The question is: Is it a good business decision? If you’ve been making pizzas for 12 years and you’ve made millions of dollars and everybody loves your pizzas and someone comes and says, ‘Hey, you should make hamburgers.’ Why? I have a great business model, and I don’t know if hamburgers are going to sell … Is our job to break barriers, or is it a business? That’s not for me to answer. If you want to talk about that with me on a philosophical level, I’m happy to: I am 100 percent for equality and gay marriage.”
From a business standpoint, everything Harrison says is accurate. While many may love see a gay Bachelor at some point, there is also a risk that many viewers against equality would tune out. The show has to make money first and foremost, and business does not always mean giving everyone a chance. As for whether or not such a money-first approach on ABC’s part is callous, we’ll let you be the judge of that.
For the record, Harrison also said that all of the reasons that we may not have a gay Bachelor are the same reasons that we would not have one who is pudgy, nerdy, or outside of the show’s “hunky bro” type that they always cast. This is what the show’s target demographic likes. The furthest away that they went with this was Ben Flajnik, and he was often mocked for being unattractive.
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Photo: ABC