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    Sunday, May 12, 2024

    Hannah B.'s 'Bachelorette' premiere: Here's a bro, there's a bro, everywhere a bro, bro

    Hannah B. toasts her men in the "Bachelorette" premiere. (John Fleenor, ABC)

    Here's to Hannah, for surviving her "Bachelorette" premiere Monday night without stumbling over her words or over-relying on "roll tide" as a space-filler. We admit that we underestimated you, dear Hannah. Please forgive us.

    Our Bachelorette meets 30 men in the episode - from an international basketball player to a "box king" to two pilots, two Lukes and one unemployed dude. As one contestant aptly put it: "Here's a bro, there's a bro, everywhere a bro, bro." Here are the best and worst moments, and the most memorable contestant occupations.

    - The best moment

    "I like modern kitchens with rustic undertones," Hannah tells Scott, a 28-year-old sales executive from Chicago, as he invites her to design her dream house. It's one of her first one-on-one moments after quickly seeing a string of men in ill-fitting suits walk out of the limo, jump over the mansion's gates or burst out of a cardboard box. Scott concurs; he also likes modern kitchens.

    However, Hannah does not like men who already have girlfriends back home. Which we soon learn is Scott's backstory. Two of Hannah's friends from last season, Katie and Demi, arrive to keep watch from behind the scenes and give the Bachelorette this kiss-of-death tidbit. Hannah quickly calls Scott aside and asks if this is true. Yes, he spoke to her as recently as Monday, but they're broken up. Is that a problem? asks Scott (and hundreds of guys on Tinder who are juggling dates with several different women this week). Scott tries to defend himself by asking if his very recent girlfriend is any worse than Hannah being in love with Colton just a few months ago? Scott, those are very different things. And no, it's not OK.

    Hannah's jaw drops nearly to the freshly washed mansion grounds. "There's no reason for you to be here if you're not serious," Hannah says. Unfortunately there's a long history of "Bachelorette" contestants having girlfriends at home. (Remember JoJo and Robby?) Thankfully, Hannah handles it quickly and decisively. Buh-bye, Scott.

    - The worst moment

    "How did you get so good at freestyle rapping?" one contestant asks.

    "ABC. Always be Cam," Cam, who is the worst, responds.

    Yes, that bit of dialogue actually happened after Cam (a 30-year-old software sales manager from Texas who thinks the most important quality in a woman is "good dental hygiene") launched into this rap:

    "I gotta keep it fresh like I'm coming out the limo / What you know about me this the rap demo / It's your boy Cam and I'm back on the mic / I'm trying to live it up like I'm living the hype / What you know about me got a soul worth saving / I'm trying to win the game like my name is Nick Saban / There's one thing I gotta say I got more flow / This the final rose and I'm ready to go!"

    While Cam isn't the first contestant in "Bachelor" franchise history to show off some questionable freestyling skills, he's definitely the first to name-drop the famed University of Alabama football coach. Hannah, obviously a proud Alabamian, loves it.

    Cam, of course, is also thinking strategically - he performed a rap in March when he was one of the five lucky contestants who met Hannah early on "After the Final Rose." Hannah was so dazzled with his first freestyle that she gave him a rose, which meant that he sailed into the premiere stress-free, knowing he couldn't be eliminated.

    "I was spitting some bars like Willy Wonka, so no big deal ... I've gotta keep the momentum going," wordsmith Cam tells the camera. "I'm not here for my 15 minutes of fame. I'm here for my lifetime of love."

    - The most memorable contestant occupations

    There's a little-known cognitive disorder called prosopagnosia, known in layman's terms as "face blindness." Sufferers have difficulty telling people apart. In severe cases, they cannot recognize the faces of their relatives or their own face in photographs.

    To watch the first episode of "The Bachelorette" is to appreciate what prosopagnosiacs endure. There are so many bland white men with the same haircut. They all look alike. Are they all named Connor? How many of them are Luke? Surely, there must be at least four Bens here. How anyone can tell these human dinner rolls apart is beyond us.

    Anyway, most of these dudes are just cannon fodder - shark chum - soon to be eliminated. This is a show where a man who sells cardboard boxes has too much personality. You don't really have to learn anyone's name until Episode 5. But that's why their job titles are so important. There's Thomas, whose job is "International Basketball Player," which every person immediately understands means he is not good enough to be an American Basketball Player. There's Garrett, the golf pro who tells Hannah that he "wants to be (her) hole in one" and yepppp we want to crawl out of our skin. There is one pilot who makes the fatal error of wearing a normal-person suit and then another pilot who wears his uniform. (Guess who gets the rose?)

    There's John Paul Jones, who introduces himself: "My friends call me John Paul Jones." His job title: John Paul Jones. There's also a dude named Grant, and when he is on screen, his title card says "unemployed," and because the producers are usually good at making up fake jobs for people who don't have any - "content creator" "social media participant" "dolphin enthusiast" - they must really, really hate this guy.

    With the exception of Cam's nightmarish performance, this initial evening is short on the sort of comically showy set-piece intros that typically take up much of the first episode. There is canned banter, of course, enough of it that even Hannah acknowledges many of her suitors seem to have been rehearsing it for days. One of the boys shows up on a tractor and serenades Hannah with a version of "Old MacDonald," the lyrics rewritten to be about his name, Matt Donald ("Here's a bro, there's a bro, everywhere a bro, bro.")

    Another alludes to the last season of "The Bachelor" by leaping over a gate. We have already forgotten his name - that prosopagnosia again! - much as we had already forgotten that the whole fence jump thing was, inexplicably, all we cared about for weeks.

    But then there was Joe, who does not arrive so much as he is delivered, carried in by forklift in an enormous cardboard container, out of which he springs. He is jovial but somehow grating, like the Zach Galifianakis type from a direct-to-DVD knockoff of "The Hangover." "I sell packages for a living. That's why I jumped out of a box," Joe, whose official job description is "The Box King," tells Hannah later by way of explanation. "I can design - I can make - any type of box."

    Now that we think of it, though, the box he came in seemed a little flimsy. Maybe that's why Hannah sent him packing.

    There are two Lukes (there are 20 Lukes, there are infinite Lukes, every man is Luke), and Big Luke, as we'll be referring to him henceforth, gets the first-impression rose. We're pretty sure he's going to be a villain. Little Luke, the "political consultant" who, it is widely known, works at a bar approximately seven blocks from our offices, gets to stay. Here a bro, there a bro, everywhere a Luke Luke.

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