Last week, The Bachelorette returned for its 19th season, this time with a delicious twist: there would be two Bachelorettes. “How will any of this work?” everyone on the show was forced to repeat multiple times, despite there being a very clear plan for the night’s events.

Gabby and Rachel, our two Bachelorettes, were part of the final three on Clayton’s season of The Bachelor. In an absolute train wreck of a finale, Clayton admitted to Gabby and Rachel that he had slept with all three of the finalists during fantasy suites, told all three of them that he loved them, and that the third contestant, Susie, had left when she found out. Unfortunately, I know the ins and outs of this drama better than I understand most current events.

While millions of people tuned in to see Gabby and Rachel meet and date 32 new men, a smaller crew is eagerly awaiting to find out who Elan Ashendorf, the eponymous Bushwick Bachelor, is going to end up with.1 The YouTube series, which premiered in February, dares to ask, “What would The Bachelor be like if the lead’s primary personality trait was ‘likes PBR’?”

Episode 1—which is, thankfully, less than 20 minutes long, unlike The Bachelor’s seemingly never-ending episodes—introduces us to Elan as a pretty typical Bushwick dude who once had sex in the trunk of a car. Instead of a cocktail party and limo entrances, Elan meets the contestants at a brewery, and, in a mixed reality TV show metaphor, they play Elan-themed bar trivia for the chance to win a PBR can immunity idol.

Like Bachelor leads past, Elan is not a particularly extraordinary dude. If the contestants were looking for a 30-year-old man who had never been in a serious relationship before, loved LEGO, and had an odd obsession with Google Sheets, they could throw a PBR in any direction outside the brewery and hit a dozen Elan archetypes.

Luckily, The Bushwick Bachelor doesn’t take itself too seriously, instead choosing to revel in cheesy ‘90s-inspired graphics and the general absurdity of dating show tropes. Episode 2–which centers around a group art challenge, a classic Bachelor date scenario—introduces a brand new contestant in the middle of the process, ruffling feathers and stealing Elan’s attention. The producers even manufacture a little drama for us, filming an eliminated contestant slapping Elan across the face post-PBR ceremony.

With only three contestants left, I’m eagerly awaiting the third—and I assume final—episode of The Bushwick Bachelor. Will Elan find love? A friend of mine who lives in Bushwick says she saw him on Tinder recently, so probably not, but I have a lot of hope for a proposal at the end of the series. Maybe Elan hides the ring in a can of a PBR, or his finalist has to build her own ring out of LEGO, or he writes out “Will you marry me?” using Google Sheets formulas. If we’re really lucky, we’ll be catching up with a spurned contestant next year as she leads The Bushwick Bachelorette.

1

Despite being covered by the New York Times, the first episode of The Bushwick Bachelor has less than 15,000 views as of writing.

Night Water

Will the Bushwick Bachelor find love?