Jodi McAlister watches The Bachelor for a living. Now she's written a book series inspired by it ... except with more diversity

An academic and lecturer at the University of Deakin, her work focuses on love, sex, women and girls in popular culture and fiction. So really, it shouldn't come as a surprise that when it comes to her other hat as an author, these topics are the core of what she writes.

"It's really hard for me to divorce my creative and my critical brains, because what I research informs what I write so much, and the things I'm interested in writing about, I often end up interested in researching as well," McAlister says.

"So while they are, in some senses, separate careers, they are deeply and fundamentally linked."

While the author, originally from Kiama on the South Coast, has a series of young adult books under her belt, her second release in the realm of adult romance, hits shelves this month.

Following on from the 2022 release, Here for the Right Reasons, the latest instalment, Can I Steal You for a Second? once again takes readers behind the scenes of the fictional dating show Marry Me, Juliet. Set in the same season as the first, the second instalment focuses on Mandie Mitchell, who went on the show to fall in love with its "Romeo", Dylan Jayasinghe Mellor, but ended up catching feelings for her fellow contestant (or "Juliet") Dylan Gilchrist.

It doesn't take long to realise the reality show that McAlister has created within her books is based on The Bachelor. It may have a different name and replace the rose ceremony with a necklace ceremony, but the premise is the same.

In fact, The Bachelor not only provided a model for the series' reality show, but it's the entire reason the books exist.

Stuck in Melbourne during its long 2020 lockdown, McAlister found herself watching Locky Gilbert's season of The Bachelor.

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"They had their COVID season and I was so fascinated by how they were going to do this, how they were going to take it. As a creative, sometimes the more limitations you have, the more interesting it is because you're forced to do really creative storytelling," McAlister says.

"So I was really excited to see how they would cope with the fact that they had to send everyone out of the mansion. And I got really frustrated with the fact that they just tried to do exactly the same thing but on Zoom. When you don't have grand splendour, when what you have is small living rooms, surely you should change your storytelling?

"And then the obvious next step is, OK, what would I do?"

It was a step that not only applied to how she would approach making a dating show in a pandemic but also how she would approach topics such as race and sexuality within a show concept that is incredibly invested in heteronormative relationships between white people.

In McAlister's first book, Here for the Right Reasons, a lot of the story revolved around racial diversity as the show ventured into having its first Romeo of colour. On-screen, it was set to be groundbreaking season, but behind the scenes, it put a lot of pressure on the character - one mistake could mean the end for any future Romeos of colour.

"I wrote that in 2020, before the enormous scandal over race happened in the US franchise, where they had their first black Bachelor, Matt James, and their host, Chris Harrison eventually ended up getting fired because of some deeply insensitive comments that he made," McAlister says.

"It accidentally turned out to be quite timely, in that sense, but I don't think you can write about reality dating shows without engaging with issues of diversity, especially racial diversity, but also gender diversity, sexual diversity, because they are so invested in the hegemonic status quo."

As McAlister revisits that same season in Can I Steal You For A Second? the reader looks through the events from a different perspective, as Mandie tries to navigate through the series as a bi-woman, hiding that fact from producers to avoid a bad edit. Or even worse, a bad response from the public.

Comparing it with the reality of reality TV, McAlister points out that both of these things were looked at in Brooke Blurton's season of The Bachelorette (and less so when she was a contestant on the Honey Badger's season). But when it comes to whether that season was hailed as a success, the jury is still out - depending on who you talk to.

"The narrative around Brooke's season was really frustrating in many ways because a lot of places really wanted to sell it as this big rating's failure," McAlister says.

"And if you look just at the overnight Nielsen ratings, it didn't do great. The franchise as a whole has been falling for a long time in that sphere and that happens in the US as well.

"But if you think about the way we actually watch television now, a lot of it is streaming, which is not captured in those ratings. And if you looked at the consolidated ratings, which do capture streaming within the first seven days, that season actually performed really well.

"The same was true about the most recent season of The Bachelor here, The Bachelors, though, I don't think we would want to describe that one as any kind of diversity win given they had three white men as the leads."

McAlister is adamant if her take on The Bachelor was to hit the screens, it would be one to remember. Diverse, yet entertaining. Some may even say a breath of fresh air for a franchise that has been going for two decades now.

When it comes to the likelihood of whether a season of The Bachelor would be as diverse as the one in McAlister's books, the author doesn't rule it out - although she says it's highly unlikely. But, if it was going to happen in any version of the show, there's a chance it could be the Australian version.

"The Australian Bachelor franchise has quite close ties to the US one, I'm fairly sure they use this one and also the Kiwi franchise to do a little bit of experimentation before they try stuff out in the US version," McAlister says.

"I don't think it's an accident, for instance, that both Australia and New Zealand had seasons with two bachelorettes before they tried that in the US. So there is a direct relationship there.

"But we also see differences in the way love is represented on the show here, that really strong marital impulse that exists in the US is not really a thing here. Despite the most recent season of The Bachelors where I think we can all agree that their engagement ring play was a terrible mistake."

Here for the Right Reasons and Can I Steal You for a Second? by Jodi McAlister. Simon and Schuster. $19.99 each.

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