Fucking Day: Labor of Love

Sometimes I think there aren’t enough reality TV shows about people so desperate to mate they make you a bit worried they might be aliens trying to trick someone into letting their offspring explode from their chest. Luckily, in the magical year of 2020, Fox took a former bachelor contestant and put her into a horror movie scenario for my entertainment. Not many reality TV shows are willing to say, “Welcome to television, gentleman, please jerk off immediately,” but Labor of Love did, and I respect it.

Labor of Love stars former Bachelor contestant Kristy Katzmann who is 41 and wants to have a baby within the same year the show is being filmed. They pair her up with a terrifying series of older bachelors who are desperate to impregnate a human woman. It has to be a mortal human woman. They are very specific about that. Most of them also repeatedly mention they would prefer the offspring to be male. Kristy, for her part, is also seeking the most genetically perfect human man to reproduce with, which is why they made the first challenge of the show delivering a sperm sample, and they have a trophy to the man with the highest sperm count. It is all very normal for she is human, like you Earth monsters, now fill her with the sperm we have counted.

It’s a little too real that this show has doctors and lawyers on it, but the man with the most sperm was an unemployed actor whose biggest role was a guest spot on a single episode of Franklin and Bash. There are a few contestants on this show who’ve found fun new ways to spell unemployed, my favorite of which is “former professional wrestler,” no current job listed.

I can’t blame the show’s producers for not picking the best potential fathers. It must have been hard to find a group of successful adult men who were willing to immediately dive into the medical grade bang bus with paper-thin walls where all of the men they will be living with for the next month are also masturbating.

Labor Of Love feels like it was made as revenge for the Bachelor. Its only goal seems to be humiliating the men willing to compete to impregnate Kristy. I love it. Before they ask the men to submit their sperm samples in the first episode, the host, Kristin Davis, asks them to raise their hand if they’ve masturbated in the last five days because that can affect your sperm count. Some of them did, and the rest were liars.

Instead of the extravagant dates and over-the-top romance of The Bachelor, Labor Of Love maintains a very clinical vibe. Kristy is referred to as “The Mother To Be,” and the men are called Dadchelors. The men chosen to stay each week get to go to the “Fatherhood Room,” which is not a metaphor; it’s a room with an enormous lit sign that says FATHER HOOD on it. That’s the level of metaphor this show is working with.

I don’t understand why romance is a factor at all in this show. Goal one is humiliating the Dadchelors; goal two is for Kristy to achieve sperm. If they had ditched any implication of romance and had Kristy fully on the hunt for that genetically perfect white gold, it would have been so much better. They should have simply given the men sharp sticks and let them battle to the death, is what I’m saying. This whole thing could have been a one episode kumite.

Instead, we get these challenges loosely based on the theme of fatherhood, which are also sort of pranks on the men. In the second episode, they all go camping. The production facility puts up a bunch of bear warning signs and has a fake park ranger give them a talk about how to be safe in the event of a bear attack. Then they put a terrible bear costume on a PA and faked a bear attack during each man’s one on one time with Kristy to see if he would protect her. One guy curled up into a ball around her. His response to a bear was to make himself snack-sized with a gooey lady center.

Another dadchelor threatened to quit the show when he heard they were camping. Most of these men were not only not ready to father a human child, they weren’t prepared to survive on their own without Kristy’s protection. The dates the winner of these challenges got varied widely in quality. Sometimes they have Kristy straddle Kyle during an aerial yoga class. Sometimes they pump twenty kids full of monster energy drinks and unleash them on Gary and Kristy at a pretend birthday party to very predictable results.

The men who endured the first two challenges, which were again, jerk off, and avoid a bear, had to undergo a birth simulator, which is basically an actual torture device, and those fake babies they give to high schoolers to annoy them into using condoms. Then at the end of each episode was the weirdly impersonal elimination process where Kristy used an iPad to move them into one of two columns in a PowerPoint presentation– either “Let’s keep dating” or “We need to talk.”

She made her decision in the house right across the street from the men while they watched her deliberate, which meant a bunch of shots of them pacing while Kristy stared at an iPad. There was an overly ambitious contestant who tried to intimidate Kristy into picking him by perching on the window sill like a puppet that wants to become a real boy.

Other strategies men employed to capture Kristy’s attention included being 6’8. Kyle introduced himself to the show by saying, “Hi, I’m Kyle; I’m six foot eight,” and honestly, they should have shut down production then and there because Kyle won. Kristy’s lizard brain simply measured all of the men and chose the largest. Tall was Kyle’s only personality trait, and it was all he needed to dominate this show.

To be fair to Kristy, it was pretty difficult to narrow down the men based on the information she was given. No reality show has ever made it harder to pick out the weirdos because agreeing to participate in the challenges was the most freakish thing anyone on this show could possibly do.

When it was time for Kristy to visit the homes of the final three men, she learned that Marcus, a doctor and former Survivor cast member, had what he called a “house mother.” He was an adult man with a full-time nanny, and he made it to the final three. The Bachelorette would have rung that information out of him by episode three and kicked his ass to the curb. Not that it mattered because Kristy immediately chose Kyle anyway, the longest human, so she was never in any danger of becoming Marcus’s new house mom.

So, you’re probably wondering how things worked out for Kristy and her tall impregnator. Sadly, like most stories where you win a person, they broke up three months after the show ended. Kristy said that when she really thought about it, they only got to go on two real dates, and she didn’t actually know him very well, which is true. The show was never date-focused, and even when things started to get remotely romantic, the producers would send in a child with a wiffle ball bat to remind everyone this is not supposed to be sexy; this is serious!

I would love to see Kyle return from Labor Of Love season 2. This time it’s all ladies competing to be impregnated by the large man. How will America like it when it’s the women going into the jerk off bus? What? I’m being told they would love that? Oh no, I’m now the showrunner of Labor Of Love Season 2: Compete To Pork Tall Kyle!

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