The eliminations on this week’s Golden Bachelorette are emotional, as eliminations almost always are on reality TV, but almost none of that emotion is directed at the show’s ostensible prize, marriage to Bachelorette Joan. When it comes time for the three rejected contestants to actually leave Bachelor Mansion, they’re much more upset about leaving each other. They hug. They cry. They slap each other’s backs and talk about how life-changing this experience has been, even if they didn’t find romantic love. “I know I’m going home a better man and a better father,†Mark tells Joan when she says good-bye. “We love you, man,†says Jonathan when Mark prepares to depart. They grip each other’s hands and embrace warmly. Guy wipes tears from his cheeks. “I’m very sad. He was my best friend,†says Pascal.
Scenes like this have become standard reality-show material; contestants all over the genre swear that the journey meant so much to them because of all the great people they’ve met. On Love Is Blind this season, Monica and Stephen’s breakup after she caught him cheating is notable not just because of Stephen’s terrible alibi, but because Taylor and Garrett are there too, supporting her through her tears. On this year’s breakout season of Love Island USA, Rob wants to leave after his romantic connection Andrea gets eliminated from the show, only to change his mind after his best friend Aaron breaks down in tears and begs him to stick it out. In an era of camaraderie on Netflix shows like Is It Cake? and Nailed It!, where even a show called The Traitors makes it clear that these people are playing a collegial game, it’s easy to forget that Great British Bake-Off was once the lone outlier of friendly reality TV.
For much of the aughts and 2010s, “not here to make friends†was the clichéd baseline of behavior in reality competitions across the board. The best-known early articulation came from within the Bachelor universe in 2012, when season 16 villain (and eventual winner) Courtney Robertson flouted all the rules and expectations of The Bachelor’s fairytale love match approach: interrupting dates, sneaking off with milquetoast bachelor Ben Flajnik late at night, and doing whatever she could to undermine the other contestants. When pushed on this behavior, though, Robertson refused to apologize, uttering a phrase she later turned into the title of her memoir: “I didn’t come here to make friends.†A decade-old compilation video of not-here-to-make-friends reality clips is over three minutes long and includes footage from America’s Next Top Model, Top Chef, Flavor of Love, Rock of Love, A Shot at Love, Survivor, The Apprentice, Project Runway, and The Amazing Race. By 2022, Rich Juzwiak’s assessment of the phenomenon was that it had become “the motto for our times,†writing that this default assumption about reality TV has seeped so much into modern life that it now “goes without saying.â€
Except in 2024, The Golden Bachelorette is full of footage of boomer guys wiping tears from their eyes as they talk about the power of their new friendships and the cast of Love Is Blind season seven cannot stop posting photos of each other with adoring captions. Did reality TV change? Did its participants?
For The Golden Bachelorette, the friendship boom might well have something to do with its unusual participants. While most reality-show cast members tend to be people in their 20s and 30s, Golden Bachelorette is full of boomers — men in their 60s, mostly, who have already been through marriages and are now divorced or widowed. Charles, who has struggled to find joy after his wife’s death, talks about how much The Golden Bachelorette means to him even after his elimination. “It really helped me pull myself out of the hardship that I experienced,†he says. “It’s a successful journey for me, to have [it] along with my friends. It’s a different form of love. I did find it.â€
Many of the men on Golden Bachelorette describe similar feelings. They’ve felt isolated from close relationships after their marriages ended. Some of them are recently retired and have lost the regular social connections that came with their careers. It’s not news that older men struggle to create and maintain friendships, and it makes sense that a few weeks hanging out together at the Bachelor mansion provided these guys with a consistent, emotionally vulnerable connection that they haven’t had since the end of their marriages. They sleep in a bunk room together; they complain about each other’s snoring; they teach each other how to do laundry. Of course some guys seem more focused on Joan (Chock clearly has his eyes on the prize), but the overall mood celebrates and values any kind of emotional bond, not just a romantic one.
But The Golden Bachelorette’s age bracket doesn’t explain the similarly exuberant friendship bonds happening on Love Is Blind’s seventh season. It’s obvious on the show — “I missed you so much!;†“My friends!;†“That’s my BOY!†— but it’s even louder outside it, where the cast members post group shots together, defend each other against rough edits, and show up in each other’s comments sections as hype men and supportive reply guys. Months before the season came out, the women were posting silly pictures together with winking captions and sending heart-emoji reactions to each other’s selfies. When shows use competition or romantic love to carry some of the weight of the narrative momentum, participants don’t have to be at each other’s throats all the time. Whether or not they come to make friends, they do make friends.
It’s also gotten easier to keep those friendships as the secondary reality-TV industry becomes more formalized. The system of podcasts, sponsorships, press appearances, paid event appearances, and spinoff reality shows for former cast members means that people who go on Survivor can become part of a huge network of former Survivor players, and Bachelor contestants become part of that universe, and Love Is Blind stars see each other again on Perfect Match, and everyone eventually ends up on Nick Viall’s podcast. It’s not that different from pledging a fraternity or rushing a sorority. Prospective members are carefully selected for how well they fit in based on looks, social connections, ambitions, charisma, and chemistry. They all go through a stressful experience together, and they come out the other side with a shared social calendar and a feeling that they’ve bonded with the only other people who experienced the same things they did.
Ironically, the old clichéd line holds true for the one subset of reality TV premised around people who are already friends. On lifestyle shows like Below Deck, Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and the Real Housewives franchise, prior social connections with each other are the reason these people have been cast together in the first place. And if they come on without any of those relationships in place, the whole point is to watch them make friends with each other. Any viewer of lifestyle reality, though, understands that this is the most vicious, backstabbing, calculated and manipulative space on television. Lifestyle TV has no competitive elimination structure or particular end goal to achieve, which means that the milestones and plot points have to be interpersonal drama.
For reality shows with non-lifestyle structures, though, friendship is the current name of the game. Social media has made post-reality show life so visible, participants go in with a much better sense of the potential long-term relationships they may be forming. Maybe Joan will find love, but it’s hard to imagine it could hold a candle to all of those men wiping tears out of their eyes and gazing at each other with fondness.