What we talk about when we talk about love: declarations of love in the American and AustralianBachelor/etteFranchises

The TV recap as paratext: Energizing, contextualizing, and modifying The Bachelor Australia

“…The formats are similar in different international territories, but are not identical and do not necessarily come with the same baggage and/or expectations. In the United States, for instance, seasons almost always end with a proposal of marriage, whereas this would be very unusual in Australia, where a commitment between Bachelor/ette and winner to remain together for the foreseeable future is much more common (McAlister, 2018a(McAlister, , 2018b.…”

“…I am a scholar of romance in popular culture, and there are few examples of this more ubiquitous than The Bachelor/ette . In addition to the immense body of work that is my recaps, I have published numerous scholarly journal articles and book chapters about the franchise (McAlister, 2016, 2018a, 2018b, 2021). In these, I frequently read the Australian franchise against the American one, examining the ways in which love and romance are constructed and discussed and what that can tell us about the way we approach these things in the two respective cultures.…”

If You Are the One and SBS: the cultural economy of difference

“…Scholars began to investigate why some programmes become successful despite the inherent cultural differences between shows and local audiences, and how genres travel across national borders (Bielby and Harrington, 2008). We learn through an analysis of Bachelor/rette , for instance, that Australian audiences prefer a somewhat different way of declaring love from American audiences, despite sharing a common romantic vocabulary; hence the need to ‘glocalize’ the script (McAlister, 2018). Some argue that the key to success lies in the balancing act between knowing how to make programmes that have global appeal and knowing what the local customs are (Moran, 2010).…”