Before you watch the clip below, please allow me a mini rant:
Tonight The Bachelorette enters week 5, and already it’s one of the most bizarre seasons of the show to date. The show’s usual story is about a put-together, confident young woman who’s only missing one piece, the prince charming, to complete her perfect life-puzzle. Instead, we have Ashley, who doesn’t seem to believe anyone could really love her, crumbles under the slightest disappointment or shade of rejection, and whose insecurities take over her body, Hulk-style, when she’s not being constantly praised or reassured by the men vying for her attention.
At best, she’s sympathetic and refreshingly realistic (who hasn’t gone after the wrong guy and then worried he wasn’t really that into her?), if increasingly annoying in the way she keeps going back to the one guy who treated her like complete garbage and proclaiming, “There was something there!” We want her to learn her lesson, and her own worth. We want her to be happy with herself, and then become happy with someone else! At best.
At worst, she’s that girl (we all know at least one) who pretends to listen but ultimately ignores all her friends’ sound advice and purposefully falls in love with jerks because deep down she doesn’t think she deserves any better. It’s that willful, self-pitying, misplaced martyr-dom that makes Ashley’s journey particularly frustrating to watch, yet almost impossible to turn away from. I’m constantly torn between wanting to hug her and wanting to shake her shoulders until her Barbie head pops off. How can someone who’s about to have the word “doctor” on her business card be so self-destructive and dumb?
As we can see in this clip from tonight’s episode, Chris Harrison knows what I’m talking about.
Ahh, Ashley, get a hold of yourself. Look what you made me do. You made me make up a new drinking game:
Take a drink every time Ashley says something insecure or mentions Bentley. But stop before you get alcohol poisoning. That should happen around 8:15pm tonight.
Unfortunately, as is The Bachelorette‘s way toward sensationalism and drama, instead of Chris Harrison just coming out and saying, “Look. Girlfriend. You’re being an idiot jerkfaced mess, and if you mention his name again I’m going to take away your wardrobe budget,” they’re going to bring Bentley back so Ashley can get closure, or mount him while sobbing for old time’s sake, or whatever a crazy girl does when she sees a guy she fell in love with after three weeks even when he never became or wanted to become her boyfriend. She’ll do the in-person version of sending a long, rambling, over-emotional Facebook message, I guess.
Until then, tonight on The Bachelorette: 10 men show us their pecks, and Ames gets a concussion. Ah, at least some things on this show are back to normal.
(Image courtesy of ABC)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
Meghan hails from Walla Walla, WA, the proud home of the world’s best sweet onions and Adam West, the original Batman. An avid grammarian and over-analyzer, you can usually find her thinking too hard about plot devices in favorites like The Office, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and How I Met Your Mother. In her spare time, Meghan enjoys drawing, shopping, trying to be funny (and often failing), and not understanding the whole Twilight thing. She’s got a BA in English and Studio Art from Whitman College, which makes her a professional arguer, daydreamer, and doodler.
