"For the first time, the girls are in charge." We beg to differ, Channel 9.

Goddamnit.

For a minute there, it looked like we might actually have a reality TV dating show that empowered the women contestants. But alas, no.

When Love Comes To Town is Channel 9’s latest reality offering and it’s the closest we’ve come to a decent woman-loving reality TV show. In the original promo, host Natalie Gruzlewski even used the phrase “For the very first time, the girls are in charge.”

Cue a line-up of buxom ladies in heat, arriving in a dusty town of country-themed hotties:

Hells yes! We thought naively. Women in charge? What a refreshing change.

And you can’t blame us — having binge-watched The Bachelor giving roses to desperate women like an Adonis high on his own masculinity — for hoping that the whole ‘girls in charge’ thing might actually be true.

You can’t help us for hoping the girls might actually be in charge of their own contrived fate on one of these “Finding Love” shows. You can’t blame us for hoping that maybe this time, we wouldn’t have to pause our feminism to enjoy some trashy relaxing TV.

Here’s how it works.

Producers at Channel Nine lead a bunch of available babes in single file onto a bus, drive them around the country to meet single hot men, and offer them the chance to pick their potential sex buddy love match. If the girls want to stay in town and pursue a romance, they do. If they’re not keen, they hop back on that bus and keep going.

And that act – getting back on the love bus – is where the empowerment is supposed to happen.

But, SPOILER ALERT: It doesn’t.

The whole show is designed to home-deliver beautiful women to single men. The guys choose the dates, the guys control the situation, and the girls trot off when they’ve been rejected. The girls are not remotely ‘in charge’, it’s just that the whole ‘man picks his woman’ thing is put off until a little later in the series.

There’s truly nothing empowering about it at all.  And frankly it’s insulting for anyone to pretend that it is. It’s just Farmer Wants a Wife all over again, except this time there’s a weird ulterior motive to promote bus travel.

The show has got all the same man-pandering, undignified bullshit any other dating show rolls out, but producers think they might have us fooled with a bit of clever marketing, a slight tweak to the rules, and a wink from the female host. When applications opened, the callout read: “Help us find love for these single guys.” Enough said.

The female contestants on the show — some of whom genuinely seem to want to ‘find love’ — are not even paid the basic courtesy of safety. Already, one woman has spoken up about being bullied, trolled, and verbally assaulted in person for her ‘flirtatious’ behaviour on the show. Another contest broke down and left the show in tears last night.

When really this is just a country and western themed revamp of The Bachelor, where every woman holds her breath for a guy to decide on their worth and desirability.

It’s humiliating, sad, and exploitative.

So. Creators of reality TV. Here’s some advice, from a reality TV junkie:

1. Make shows where women actually do have the power to choose who they date.

2. Be upfront about your motives or risk making your viewers feel cheated. We will still watch something with a tagline like “We’re just setting up sexy people with sexy people again.”

3. Do a gay man version of The Bachelor because why doesn’t this exist already.

4. Do a lesbian Bachelorette because it would be awesome.

5. Actually protect the contestants you make all of your money by filming.

6. Stop calling grown women ‘girls’. They’re not teenagers.

I love a trashy reality TV show, I watch ’em all the time. They’re weird, perverse glimpses into human nature and they have a place on our TVs. But if this form of faux-reality entertainment is going to continue to appeal to people with brains, it’s going to need to diversify and fast.

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