The Bachelor just isn’t the same

“The Bachelor” was my island in an ocean of reality show sea scum. It was nothing like its… “The Bachelor” was my island in an ocean of reality show sea scum. It was nothing like its awful and gimmicky spin-off shows “Joe Millionaire” or “Average Joe,” both of which play on some sick public desire to witness deceit, manipulation and humiliation.

Besides the usual criticisms that it makes dating a competition and it forces a guy to pick a woman from a chosen few, “The Bachelor” seemed straightforward and benevolent enough to hook even a staunch reality-show hater. Yeah, sure, it all takes place in TV land paradise — where you have a live-in makeup artist, and every date is expensive, well-planned and captured in cinematographic excellence — but at the root, it felt like watching people just like us searching for that special someone.

Then ABC raised the sea level.

This season of “The Bachelor” is so flooded with flashy ratings maneuvers that I might have to abandon Wednesday girls’ nights just to keep my head above water.

I mean, Jesse Palmer? Is this necessary? Isn’t it pretty obvious that this guy is going to have, and has had, plenty of opportunities to meet women? This show used to be about finding love, not getting rich and famous. Shouldn’t you just watch “American Idol” if that’s your thing? Why do we have to complicate a benign concept?

Now we’ve got a situation wherein women who may not be completely interested in the bachelor’s personality turn into gold-diggers in hot pursuit for all the wrong reasons. I’m not making this up, it’s already happening with at least one woman on the show.

It must not be entertaining enough to have eligible guys like Aaron Buerge or “bachelorettes” like Trista Rehn on the menu — being a good-looking, intelligent, financially stable professional just doesn’t cut it anymore. The public demands a nationally recognized millionaire sports figure to confuse women with press, sports prowess and the promise of loving her as long as he doesn’t have a game. We need special twists that add unnecessary pressure and complications to an already emotionally complex situation.

And now there’s a spy. She pretends to be one of the women vying for Jesse’s heart, though she’s really his best friend, whispering back to him all the dirty information she digs up when he’s not around. It’s a good thing ABC didn’t let us know who she was at first; blurring her face and changing her voice created a lot of nail-biting suspense the first night. The fact that there was only one woman wearing more than a size three didn’t give it away at all.

Why didn’t they think of this sooner? Now I can enjoy all the suspense of wondering if Jesse will take his spy’s advice, if the other girls will figure it out, or if Jesse won’t offer her a rose the next time, so he can go at it alone. The possibilities for drama are so great, my brain is overheating. I don’t even have to care about Jesse finding a woman he loves, I can watch in hopes of tension between the spy and the women, the spy and Jesse and the regular, inevitable cat-fight tension.

And to top it all off, Jesse has already given out a special, pre-ceremony, “first-impression rose” that sparked some estrogen issues. He’s “forgotten” one woman’s name, resulting first in the extension of a rose to the wrong woman, and then the addition of an extra rose to compensate for Jesse’s true desires. If that’s not enough, previews promise there will be some sort of “stalker” later on.

It’s all just so exciting. I can barely keep my finger off the channel-up button.

But I will. I refuse to abandon ship just yet. There’s still hope for this show turning out to be somewhat “normal.” Just as soon as the spy’s gone, the gold diggers get booted, the host stops popping in with surprise roses and dating situations, and Jesse becomes somewhat lovable. I think things will get back to the good ol’ “Bachelor” beginnings.

Then again, there are reruns of “Seinfeld” on at that time, too.