Parents on "The Bachelorette" I've been watching the trashy and highly popular reality show "The Bachelorette", which knows very well what sort of figure people want to look at.  The lead Bachelorette (or Bachelor) is good-looking and thin, pretty much every time.  The contestants who vie for the love of this person and/or pretend to do so are universally pretty and thin (or visibly muscular).  It's about what you'd expect. Near the end of each season the few finalists get "hometown dates" in which the person whose hand in marriage they are all pursuing goes on a date in each one's home city, meeting (if possible) the contestant's family. The parents of these Hollywood-pretty people are often morbidly obese.  It's jarring and a little embarrassing.  It actually makes me feel a little bit sorry for the show's producers, who in other contexts generally come across as being evil manipulators who will sell out the dignity of any contestant or of the audience for any little bit of sensationalist drama.  Here they've worked so hard for weeks or months to pick out these superficially highly appealing people who will help their show look good and succeed...  and now they have to put on the lumpy old beasts who somehow spawned such pretty children, and pretend it's heartwarming when the contestants hug them and get relationship advice from them and completely fail to acknowledge how pathetically diseased they look. I took screenshots of the few dudes currently still in the competition, and their families: Here is Eric, a high-spirited dude who has lately been rising in the competitive ranks..  Eric was somehow born of a union between a garbage bag and some kind of a nondescript lump.  His hometown date went very well despite the number of future heart attacks that were being quietly nurtured in the room where the family met.  But he is probably not going to win the Bachelorette. Next is Bryan, a front-runner who is disliked by some for his phony-seeming pickup artistry.  Bryan is clearly in good shape. His mom is little and maybe thin-ish (it's hard to tell).  But here is his dad, from whom he did not learn the habit of exercise.  The dude's face is all spotted; in closeup shots he looks like he is about to die.  When the couple arrives, he struggles a bit to get out of his chair.  No one comments on these sickening, unmissable facts. Last is the other front-runner, Peter, a movie-star-looking dude who has worked as a model and as a personal trainer.  Panties moisten across the nation whenever he comes on the screen.  He seems to be a good dude and /r/thebachelor has him on a pedestal 90% of the time, and complains in impotent backlash against his shallowly motivated popularity the remainder of the time.  His parents?  A pair of smiling beanbag chairs, evidently. I have no particular point here.  It's just kind of a funny thing.  I've watched this silly show for a few seasons now and this seems to happen more often than not.  It's a funny thing, and a sad thing.  Even our trash TV that's specifically focused on romance and physical beauty gets tainted around the edges by the overconsumption plague.  I assume that probably other countries' Bachelor franchise spinoffs have some thinner parents, especially the Asian ones (I think there are Asian ones). The current Bachelorette is the first black one ever, and people interested in the show are making a huge deal about that of course.  But nobody ever seems to even consider talking about how there will probably never be an obese Bachelorette (or Bachelor), or about how strange it is when the show reaches the hometown date episodes and suddenly a lot of distorted humanesque blobmonsters start appearing on the screen, when as anyone can see one of the main points of the show is to titillate viewers by showing only pretty people whenever possible.  This show knows what people want (on a shallow level at least), and I have the feeling that if they could realistically try to select contestants with beautiful bodies and beautiful parents, they would start doing it in a second.