Television Tuesday: The Clayton Echard Season of, "The Bachelor," Has Me Wondering What We Did to Deserve Such Punishment

"The Bachelor," and, "The Bachelorette," have good seasons and bad seasons. Oftentimes a season rises and falls based on who the actual bachelor/bachelorette is. Sometimes we get a fantastic personality who we root for to actually find love and other times it is a total slog of a season. We are two episodes into the Clayton Echard season of, "The Bachelor," and all I can do is hope things improve.

Clayton finished eighth in the most recent season where Michelle sent him home before a whole chunk of other men. Do you know who would've been a better bachelor than Clayton? Basically any of her top 4 (besides who she picked, Nayte, as they're still happily together). We have Rodney just sitting here being sweet, amazing, caring, and actually sporting a personality and now we just have to hope he's on Bachelor in Paradise this Summer. Seriously, look at who we could've had:

Why couldn't we get Rodney?

Now know that we got Clayton, someone whose entire personality seems to be that new host Jesse Palmer refers to him as, "Genuine." Oh, and he played football in the past and wants kids. He's bland, like if you sat down to a meal and started chewing cardboard. Thank God the ladies are interesting, with the usual mix of sweet and vicious (that should be a hot sauce flavor). I wish Clayton were more interesting as his hometown of Eureka is just 20 minutes from where I live, so I should support someone local, but he's just kind of...there. He listlessly wanders around the room like an abandoned spaceship floating through nothingness and all the women in this metaphor are space bandits swarming him as if he were holding a big treasure. Anything at all intriguing on this show comes from the contestants and I kind of get what one who got sent home the first night for talking smack about Clayton was getting at, he's just a bit boring.

Again, Clayton is a perfectly nice guy and he is extremely...genuine. He just is kind of boring for, "The Bachelor," and it hasn't been this drab a season since Colton was on, and Colton's season only became retroactively more interesting when he came out as gay (and it gave us Demi, one of my favorite participants on the franchise ever). Maybe these two episodes have not set the tone for the season and it will, in fact, be the most dramatic season ever as we are always promised with every new lead. I have concerns right now, however. We'll see next week (this week there wasn't a show due to football) if things can turn around.

2 out of 5 stars (for the first two episodes).