One could argue that The Bachelor, the ABC reality juggernaut that has reified Christian-lite dating norms for 27 seasons, should be considered scripted content. The connections can be genuine, and the feelings often real, but the situations are contrived and manipulated, a pioneering brand of deliberately saccharine, hokey and ridiculous in the name of love and for the sake of entertainment. Watching The Bachelor and its spinoffs, as I occasionally have over its two-plus-decade run, is to be baffled, frustrated, annoyed and ultimately hooked. The show, with its in-group rituals and shocking sincerity, casts a strange spell over its contestants and its viewers; if you stick through one episode, you’re liable to start caring about what happens.
No such spell exists for The Wrong Paris, Netflix’s latest attempt to build an in-house Hallmark Channel, in which Miranda Cosgrove plays a single woman who goes on a reality dating show for what Bachelor Nation would call “the wrong reasons”. No offense to the Hallmark Channel, which at its best can be laughably unserious fun. But The Wrong Paris, written by Nicole Henrich and directed by Janeen Damian, somehow serves the synthetic sugar of both The Bachelor and the Hallmark movie without any sweetness. The formula is there, but not the flavor, nor the drop of derangement – like, say, a hot snowman brought to life – required to beat the Netflix allegations of low-quality, lowest-common-denominator stuff.
The setup, at least, is promising, like a fluffier and sillier UnReal. In an almost daringly utilitarian first scene, the stakes are set: Cosgrove’s Dawn, a Girl With Tools in a Small Town With Dead Parents, achieves her dream of getting into art school in Paris. But her “Paris fund” cash jar cannot cover the $30,000 tuition, especially after she personally paid the healthcare costs for her grandmother/guardian (Frances Fisher). Her sister Emily (Emilija Baranac), an avid fan of a show called the Honeypot – The Bachelor, if at the very end the lucky lady has the option to choose money instead of engagement – has an alternative plan: go on the show, conveniently set in Paris, for the $20,000 appearance fee and plane ticket, then get herself eliminated ASAP.
A ludicrous invisible hand of plot should be part of the enjoyment, so I’ll keep it brief: Dawn, a master of all non-city skills – welding, farming, kicking the ass of creepy, sniveling out-of-towners – gets on the show. But thanks to a plucky producer (Insecure’s Yvonne Orji, too good for this), the competition is set in Paris, Texas. Specifically, at the Yellowstone-aspiring ranch of one Trey McAllen III (Pierson Fodé, doing a budget impression of Matthew McConaughey), with whom Dawn had a brief meet-cute at a local bar before filming. (True to the spirit of the movie, British Columbia stands in for Texas ranch country.) The fact that the preposterously ripped Trey is frequently shirtless and good with horses, and that Dawn also low-key really loves horses, complicates her secret plan to take the money and run. Not even the drives-a-truck and makes-her-own-spurs Dawn is immune to the power of a six-pack, especially if it’s wearing tight jeans.
Which is all well and smooth-brained good, with a couple of satirical shots at The Bachelor via archetypes of its contestants: the princess (Madeleine Arthur), the muscly badass (Veronica Long), the awkward nerd (Christin Park), the baby-fevered Christian girl (Hannah Stocking), the influencer (Madison Pettis, rounding out a cast that is almost entirely alums of Disney or the Netflix romcom To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before). Unfortunately, the film’s basic construction fails to clear the requisite low bar – shoddy editing that nearly cuts off lines, camera work so front-focused that it looks filmed in iPhone Portrait Mode, framing that warps inexplicably into near-fisheye.
Even worse, there is barely a spark between the two fated lovers. Despite some limp sparring, the only friction between Dawn and Trey is the quality of their hair – she has the perfect curl waves natural only to television, and he has the crispiest ends I’ve ever seen on a man. Cosgrove, a former child actor and veteran of Nickelodeon’s millennial YA staple iCarly (and its far less successful adult reboot), is much better suited to handle the overdrawn slapstick comedy of this genre – pigging out on wings, tripping and falling into a pool – than the attempts at genuine romantic beats.
Neither Cosgrove nor the mechanical script sells Dawn’s pivot from betting it all on art school to love, which is irksome, if expected. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive – this is, after all, not meant to be taken too seriously. But it’s hard not to detect a whiff of regression in, to borrow a term beloved by reality television, Dawn’s journey from fiercely independent student to willing to sacrifice her big dream for a guy (who has money and will pay for things). That that’s the fantasy – in a movie aiming broadly for middle America, amid a great rightward lurch in culture – feels less like a happy ending than a bummer sign of the times. Those seeking a feelgood romcom should keep looking.
