Trouble in Paradise
BACHELOR IN PARADISE ★★½
Series return,Tuesday (April 9), 7.30pm, Ten
Confirming that "dating show participant" is now a career, Bachelor in Paradise, the Aloha-shirt-wearing, cocktail-sipping cousin of The Bachelor/ette returns with a seasoned cast. As the US format dictates, each of the 15 lonely hearts has done this before – some of them twice. Surely these pretty young things so cursed in love know how to maximise their airtime with pouts, tiffs and a bit of nooky in the bushes? Not so, insists first-time Bachelor executive producer Ciaran Flannery. No matter how firmly some eyes may be on an Instagram-influencer prize, no one can sustain an act for long under the gaze of fixed rig cameras and a roaming crew.
"Once people have done one visit to the reality world, they might be more aware of how to carry themselves, but at the same time, these people know each other," Flannery explains. "People who've been on previous shows see each other at events and some of them are friends. As a producer, you're blessed because there's content from day one. When they're in the resort in Fiji for four weeks, even if their guard is up, it doesn't stay up for long. We find that with all reality shows. There's only so long that people can keep the walls up. The true person always comes out."
It's this working theory that guarantees the drama that fuels the virtual watercooler chat that is big business for the network. Personalities are selected based on their history of connecting or clashing. It's no accident that the gender split is uneven – nine women to six men – or that "characters" include a mix of innocents and troublemakers, and a wildcard import from the US Bachelor. A team of loggers supplied by Warner Bros., the company commissioned by Ten to produce the show, works around the clock to transcribe conversations in the pools and cabanas, tagging key words so that producers can easily access the juiciest parts. So fiery is the mix this season that Flannery expects the social media hit rate to go through the roof.
"Social media is absolutely critical and just to see the way that Network Ten have scaled up its social media department over the last few years demonstrates that. The numbers on social media with this franchise reach, compare with or exceed broadcast television, so it's a really crucial marketing promo tool now."
Hence online panel discussion show Paradise Unpacked, the "bespoke content" created to feed viewers' hunger for more details about the "love triangles and squares" inside the luxury compound, that garners more than 400,000 views per episode.
"We wanted to recreate what was going on in lounge rooms around Australia," says Flannery. "People have Bachelorette parties or Paradise parties where they'll eat popcorn and joke and laugh and enjoy the show. It's not just become an appointment to view. It's become an appointment to view together which I think is fascinating because it does hark back to an older time."
Except that back then families liked their entertainment in this timeslot considerably cleaner. Now, government guidelines are stretched to allow children to watch scantily clad singles hooking up, as long as the sex is merely implied.
"We know that the Bachelor franchise is something that younger people enjoy as much as adults," says Flannery. "Of course there's romance. The way that we treat that, we're just a little careful. We don't want it to become too salacious. We want to be respectful of our audiences."