James Weir recaps The Bachelor’s new three-for-one value pack deal

It’s the big shake-up that’s meant to save one of TV’s biggest bombs — and it’s already been torpedoed. James Weir recaps.

Like a breakfast cereal that has been revamped with the addition of more sugary crap, Channel 10’s The Bachelor is tripling the suitors and recruiting three white guys to front the upcoming season in a desperate attempt to get us all interested again.

The Bachelor — now with three times the boredom!

The sickening spin on the original recipe is even less substantial than before. It’ll rot your brain and make you feel sick immediately after consumption.

Who are the three guys? Doesn’t matter. Their names aren’t important. Two of them look like twins and the third looks like Machine Gun Kelly’s nerdy cousin who just moved out of home and discovered rap music.

RELATED: Abbie Chatfield slams lack of diversity on new Bach

Viewers should not be fooled. Nothing good ever comes from a three-for-one deal. I once worked at a regional Jay Jays and had to organise the big display table stacked high with slogan T-shirts. “Three for $30!” screamed the neon cardboard promo signs.

One Thursday night, I ploughed my hand through the pile and it mooshed into a half-eaten cheeseburger.

That kind of gross surprise is awaiting us with The Bachelor’s own three-for-one deal.

The Bachelor’s new three-for-one special.

“We’re doing a world-first,” host Osher Gunsberg said on The Project this week while announcing the format change.

“No one in the world has ever had three bachelors, and therefore the way it works and the way everyone gets to know each other is very different this year.”

Sounds tedious. We’ve been watching this show for a decade – and now we’ve gotta learn new rules? Hopefully the boys just treat it like a game of Monopoly by blatantly cheating until Osher flips the board and cries.

“It has already been fascinating,” Osh continued. “We have been going for a while now and it is already just electrifying what we are seeing. Not only did we go to head office to say, ‘Can we have three bachelors?’ but also, ‘We want to do it without candles and without fairy lights’. That was a meeting we had to get through.”

No candles or fairy lights? We knew things were dire over there at Channel 10, but none of us thought they were literally struggling to keep the lights on.

Now that the last episode of Neighbours has been filmed, maybe producers can just hack away at the Ramsay Street set and use it as kindling. We’d love to watch a date on The Bachelor unfold as Susan’s living room burns in the background.

All this rejigging of the format is supposed to save the troubled franchise after years of plummeting ratings. The show had its worst launch in history last year with just 482,000 metro viewers tuning in. Throughout the season, that number dipped to a low of 360,000.

Making The Bachelor’s three-for-one deal even more desperate is the fact producers have tried to capitalise on the latest celebrity boyfriend trend: the alterna-dude.

If you go for a casual scroll around any tabloid website, you’ll notice the rise of hot women dating alternative-looking guys.

Kim Kardashian and goofy comedian Pete Davidson. Megan Fox and tatted rapper Machine Gun Kelly. Kourtney Kardashian and punkish Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker.

Travis and Kourtney, Pete and Kim, Machine Gun Kelly and Megan.

These boys aren’t like the traditional clean-cut hunks who usually front shows like The Bachelor. But because Network Ten is hastily trying to catch any wave it can, execs made sure to recruit an alterna-dude into the trio of suitors.

The Bachelor’s Machine Gun Kelly wannabe ticks all the boxes on the alterna-dude criteria sheet: bad neck tattoos, piercings, hair bleached to buggery.

Including an alterna-dude is The Bachelor’s version of diversity.

The moment execs locked him in with the other two guys, they would’ve been fist-pumping the air and thinking, “Home run!’”

But these changes, much like the alterna-dude’s bleached hair, are merely superficial.

Fake Machine Gun Kelly vs real Machine Gun Kelly.

Along with the three-for-one bachelors, the show has also pulled a sea change by relocating from Sydney to the Gold Coast – an iconic Aussie paradise synonymous with sun, surf and Schapelle Corby.

The glitz! The glamour! The glassings!

Apparently the show wasn’t bogan enough to begin with.

All these tweaks are just last-ditch attempts to lure us into watching.

The Bachelor is like a really needy ex who keeps desperately trying to win us back – getting new haircuts and posting racy photos on Instagram, hoping to make us jealous of their fun new life.

Remember when producers would edit one girl to look like a crazy clinger? Well, now The Bachelor itself has become the clinger – obsessed with getting our attention.

It seems producers have forgotten the number one rule of dating: stop trying so hard.

Nothing is more of a turn off.

Facebook, Twitter: @hellojamesweir