Brooke Blurton is the first; will a bisexual Bachelor be close behind?

Whether or not Australians tune in to Brooke Blurton in The Bachelorette, the world will be watching – or at any rate, that part of the world with a vested interest in the ongoing viability of one of the most successful reality franchises ever created.

Since The Bachelor debuted in the US in 2002, it has produced 25 seasons, five spin-off series (including The Bachelorette, The Bachelor in Paradise and its snow-bound cousin, The Bachelor: Winter Games), a bunch of talk shows and a handful of one-off specials.

Familiar, yet not: Brooke Blurton has been a contestant on The Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise, but now she’s at the centre of things, as the first openly bisexual Bachelorette in the world.Credit: Ten

Internationally, the franchise has spawned versions in Greece, Israel, Canada, Brazil, Romania, the UK and New Zealand, as well as Australia. It may not have produced many lasting couples, but it’s rained cash for Warner Bros Television, which owns the format, and its many broadcast partners.

But while its contestants may be overwhelmingly young, the format itself is starting to look a little grey around the temples. It’s not just that the heavily stage-managed dates, the rose ceremonies and the never-ending supply of champagne are all a bit too familiar, it’s that the relentlessly heterosexual Mills and Boon version of romance at its core looks increasingly dated – and the declining ratings (this season’s finale of The Bachelor was the least-watched in its nine Australian seasons) suggests something needs to change.

Hilary Innes, Ten Network’s executive producer of the Bachelor franchise.

Enter Brooke Blurton, who is, boasts Hilary Innes, Ten’s executive producer of the Bachelor franchise and a veteran of 11 seasons, “the first openly bisexual Bachelorette anywhere in the world”.

Attentive viewers will recognise Blurton from the 2018 season of The Bachelor, where she made it to the final three before walking out on Nick “The Honey Badger” Cummins before he could give or withhold a rose. A year later she was back, on Bachelor in Paradise, where she and former Bachelorette Alex Nation had a brief dalliance.

Casting an openly bisexual lead is a risk, but a calculated one. “The franchise needs to be brought into the now, to our contemporary world, whatever that means,” says Innes. “It needed a jolt.”

One year after appearing in the “Honey Badger” edition of The Bachelor, Brooke Blurton appeared in Bachelor in Paradise, where she shared with Alex Nation the first same-sex kiss in the Bachelor franchise’s Australian history.Credit: Network 10

In Blurton, it gets two jolts for the price of one: the 26-year-old West Australian is of mixed-race heritage, with an Aboriginal-Malaysian mother and a white father and, to the best of Innes’ knowledge, that makes her the first First Nations person to front the franchise anywhere in the world.

Innes says there’s no doubt the executives at Warner Bros will be paying very close attention to this season, to see how audiences respond, how the drama plays out, and whether the potential for chaos can be safely harnessed (with heterosexual male, bisexual female and lesbian contestants, there are lots of opportunities for romantic attention to wander from the star of the show).

“I think the franchise has to evolve,” says Innes. “This is a big first step with Brooke for all the obvious reasons, stepping into a world of bisexuality for a start, out of a very heterosexual world globally on this brand, and then also of course into celebrating a young First Nations woman in that role as well. But yes, I think we need to do more of it and I think this will open the door to that. I really hope so.”

There’s little question that Australian attitudes to sexuality have evolved considerably since the show debuted here in 2013. For a start, same-sex marriage is legal now. And to get a sense of just how marked and how swift the evolution has been, one need look no further than Brooke Blurton herself.

In season six, Ten made great hay of the “big reveal” Blurton had in store for the Honey Badger, running promos for a week ahead of the episode. When it came, it was the news that she had dated women as well as men in the past. Cummins nodded sagely, his expression midway between nonplussed and stunned mullet (though maybe that was just the hair).

“I’m not bisexual or a lesbian or anything like that,” she added, lest the horses be too startled.

Oh, how times have changed.

Now, it’s a point of difference, a way of making the show seem more in touch with the contemporary reality of the world of dating.

And, according to Innes – who studied anthropology at university and once dreamed of being “the next Margaret Mead” (the pioneering anthropologist who famously detailed the sexual lives of the Pacific islands) – it opens up a whole new window into the dating rituals of the species in captivity.

“I’ve watched lots of women and men romance each other, but I’d never watched women romance women. It’s so interesting to be able to observe the different approaches they take to each other. I don’t want to say too much, but the women with women go very deep very quickly. It’s way more interesting than just watching good old heterosexual romance.”

In some ways, casting the pre-tested Blurton is a relatively safe “bold” move. But could the franchise take it a step further, and extend its open-mindedness so far as to have a bisexual male Bachelor at some stage? Is the world ready for that?

“I think they are. I would hope they are,” Innes says. “I mean, whether or not we are so prescriptive that we go from one to the next is a good question. It will be a combination of a whole lot of things that gives us who that person is.

“But I think the world’s ready and I think it would be really exciting to go down that path. Watch this space.”

The Bachelorette is on Ten from Wednesday, October 20.

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