I hate small talk. I wanna talk about atoms, death, aliens, sex, magic, intellect, the meaning of life, faraway galaxies…I like people with depth, who speak emotion from a twisted mind. I don’t want to know ‘what’s up’.
Wow. That’s intense, at least as intense as you are going to get from someone who uses “wanna” as a word. So espouses the latest Bachelor, Nick Viall on his Instagram page – or at very least, so espouses some random meme he has decided to paste there.
But assuming the words are indeed Nick’s own, one wonders what he hopes to find on this season of The Bachelor. You just know that when you try to talk to the average bachelorette about astronomy they will offer you up their star sign, and the last time I heard anyone on The Bachelor have a discussion about dark matter, it was last season’s Jubilee:
“What’s that black shit on top of my hors d’oeuvre?”
And then she spat a mouthful of caviar into a table napkin.
But this is what Nick hopes for and maybe these words would have appeared on his application for the latest season of The Bachelor franchise…if he had actually had to apply. It seems that the United States is facing a shortage of eligible single men and they have borrowed back from seasons past to find their latest keeper of the roses.
Not that recycling is too unusual of course. Bachelorettes are regularly drawn from crowd favourites of seasons past. I guess they could have drawn from some of JoJo’s rejects if they hadn’t all been so boring and whiny (Evan), dweeby (Wells) or nut job crazy (Heeeeere’s Chaddy). However as far as recycling goes, Nick really takes the cake. This is his fourth crack at finding love.
Needless to say, Nick Viall is pretty well known to American audiences, but may not be quite as well known to Aussie devotees, so I thought I would try to provide a bit of a background to the man.
Search for him in Google and a side-bar will pop up telling you that he is a 36-year-old from Milwaulkee (cue Laverne and Shirley theme), Wisconsin and that he has 127 siblings.
What? Let me recount. One, two, three……..nine, ten. Ten siblings! It hardly comes as a surprise then, that he comes from a conservative Roman Catholic family of which he is the second oldest of eleven. His parents started popping out sprogs pretty young, and his Mum is actually only a few years older than I am, and in better Nick (see what I did there?).
What did surprise me was that all of the siblings appear in the sidebar in hyperlink blue. How had I not heard of this amazingly accomplished family before, I thought to myself. So much hyperlinkage in one family! So I randomly clicked on one of the brothers and was taken to a news story about a former Catholic priest of that name who had been found guilty of sexually molesting a number of pre-pubescent boys. A quick bit of maths told me that since this guy was preying on innocents in the 1970s, this was not the family I was looking for (or at least not a sibling). From there the links all seemed to steer towards one article written by one of the entertainment syndicates about Nick’s involvement in The Bachelor, and that meant his family is not that exciting at all. Having said that, what amazing potential for the home town visit week where some unsuspecting girl gets to meet the extended clan and relive the Spanish Inquisition! If only one or two of those siblings are borderline psychopaths, I anticipate a whole lot of fun.
Prior to becoming a television man-whore, Nick was a software salesman and model. If I had a dollar for every salesman/model who had made their way onto The Bachelor/ette, I would have more money than if I didn’t. His Instagram posts are clearly all about both the selling and the modelling. There are heaps of pictures with his parents and heaps of him with little kids, in a my-siblings-have-populated-an-entire-county-with-nieces-and-nephews kind of way; not a Vile Reverend Viall sort of way. And of course there’s the wanky model stuff:
He’s sometimes a bit of a joker…
…which is the only possible explanation for this cardigan monstrosity:
He loves animals, like big dogs…
…middle sized dogs…
…little dogs dressed in suits…
…rabbits…
…and frogs.
Aaaaaaaaaaw! Nothing like little kids and animals to win over the ladies, right? And yet here he is still single.
So let’s have a quick look at his Bachelor history. He has twice been the runner-up on The Bachelorette. Most recently on Australian screens we had to look at the devastated countenance of Little Matty when Georgia chose Lee over him. How could one come back for another round after after suffering such humiliation?
Apparently it’s easy if you are a bit of an arsehole.
Nick’s first appearance was on The Bachelorette Season 10. The bachelorette was Andi Dorfman and she eventually ditched Nick for Josh Murray. Rather than fading away into nothingness, Nick decided to tell everybody about how he and Andi had sex in the fantasy suite. Not cool.
After her relationship with Josh broke down, Andi turned her whole reality TV experience into a tell all book: It’s Not OK: Turning Heartbreak into Happily Never After. If that’s not a title screaming revenge, I don’t know what is.
She recalls what Nick said to her in the boudoir in the Dominican Republic: If I had four times, I’d like to f— the first three times and make love the fourth.
Maybe because of that type of boyish charm (cough), Nick was not chosen for The Bachelor. Nor was he an original contestant on season 11 of The Bachelorette. But wouldn’t you know it, while filming in New York, bachelorette Kaitlyn Bristowe “ran into” Nick and invited him to join in. Of course he said yes. No doubt that ruffled a few cock feathers on that season She took him all the way to the final two before ditching him for current fiancé Shawn Booth.
This time Nick didn’t have to tell everybody that he had sex with Kaitlyn in the fantasy suite. The suite had been wired for sound.
Despite being runner-up. Nick was still not considered for a gig as the main man. That role went instead to third place-getter, Peter Brady lookalike, Ben Higgins.
Instead, the producers threw Nick a bone and offered him a place on the train-wreck that is Bachelor in Paradise which seems to be an alcohol-fuelled exile for crazies (Jubliee, Lace, Chad anyone?), poor pitiful me types (Evan, Caila) and BAD BOYS.
Nick was in his element here for a while, instantly latching on to a Ben Higgins reject: squeaky-voiced single mum Amanda.
Oh what a blissful few days they were, until the producers dropped into the mix old adversary Josh Murray, who treated him like the ninety-pound weakling in need of Charles Atlas, and ran off with the girl.
Nick spent the remainder of his time on BIP attempting to sabotage Josh and Amanda’s thing, mostly by quoting Andi Dorfman’s book, which didn’t paint him too nicely either. When that didn’t work, he started a fling with Jen, another Ben Higgins reject, before being a cad at the end and not offering her an engagement ring.
So maybe it’s not that America is running out of eligible, single men after all. Maybe it’s just (and shhhhhhh…don’t tell anyone this…) that The Bachelor is not so much about finding true love, but creating really good bad television. And for that, bad boy Nick ticks all the boxes. A mummy’s boy, dog loving, atom talking BAD BOY.
Besides, there’s really only six good reasons to watch The Bachelor…and here they are:
In case you missed those, here they are again:
The Bachelor Season 21 starts on Nine Life on Tuesday Jan 3 at 8:30pm
Photo credits:
Nick Viall Instagram
Google images
friday night with kath 