Last week, I picked my daughter up from a weeklong Brigham Young University youth sports camp. She stayed in one of the on-campus freshman dorms, and when I walked in to help carry her suitcases, I was overcome with memories of my own freshman year at BYU — one of the happiest times of my life that I would not, for millions of dollars, live through again.
I made lifelong friends in the dorms. Benefited from the lectures of brilliant professors. Gained a sense of self living away from home for the first time. And I went on a lot of first dates.
I think I thought these dates were fun, at the time, but when I think back on Friday nights spent eating Wendy’s in the Cougareat with 18-year-old boys, I experience a full-body cringe. I’ve tried to repress those memories, and had been pretty successful in doing so, until a little YouTube show popped up in early 2019 titled “The Bachelor of Provo.”
The show followed the same format as the well-known ABC dating program “The Bachelor,” but instead of starring a former college football star and a bunch of Instagram models, it starred one BYU freshman boy and a handful of freshman girls.
The show was the brainchild of Remington Butler, who enlisted his roommate Collin Ross to be the bachelor. They began filming in the basement of Butler’s co-producer Carson Brown’s parents’ home, and they never expected their project to reach millions of viewers. But it quickly gained traction online. “We did not think it would have blown up how it did,” Butler told me during a phone interview. He and his team were surprised when popular YouTuber Noel Miller started posting reaction videos to the episodes, bringing the attention of hundreds of thousands of viewers to their small film project.
The show gained so much traction, that Butler and Brown received a cease and desist letter from Warner Bros., leading to a name change from “The Bachelor of Provo” to “Provo’s Most Eligible.”
Much of the reaction to the show was mockery in certain internet corners like Miller’s YouTube channel. “We were definitely happy (with the success),” Butler said. “But then we realized we were confronting all this internet hate towards us, and having our dating lives on the internet. We clearly didn’t think that all the way through, maybe.”
Elsewhere on the World Wide Web, myself and other BYU alumnus reacted with secondhand embarrassment at reliving the most awkward aspects of our freshman years.
To their credit, the “Provo’s Most Eligible” team decided to lean into the notoriety and put even more time and effort into the show’s production. By the end of the fifth episode in Season 1, each episode had nearly a hundred thousand views. Some even had over two hundred thousand.
So the team decided to make a second season, this time with three bachelorettes at its center.
Season 2 premiered in the latter-half of 2019 and had a clear upgrade in production quality. It experienced much of the same success of Season 1 on YouTube.
By this time, the show was the talk of campus. “We were recognized fairly often, and people would come up to us getting pictures,” Butler said. It was also the talk of Utah-centric internet culture. I had given myself the job of recapping every episode and enlisted some colleagues to help. Butler and his team were such good sports about it, they had us host the season one and season two finale events. And after two seasons, “Provo’s Most Eligible” had legitimately become my favorite show.
As much as I, and others like me, watched, cringing, through laced fingers, remembering Cougareat dates, I was genuinely riveted by the innocence of the contestants, the human drama of these near-children dating each other, and the quirks of life on BYU campus that only those who survived it can appreciate.
And I couldn’t wait for Season 3.
But I had to wait when COVID-19 shut the world down. And I’ve been waiting for six years now, while Butler and his team, rightly, focused on and completed school. “I wasn’t really planning on picking it back up again,” Butler told me.
But after he graduated and had a little more time on his hands, he and the former-star-turned-producer Ross wondered if the time was right to start filming their next installment. “Utah was kind of hitting another popularity swing with ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ and ‘The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and we thought it might be a good time actually to try and bring it back and see if we can ride that wave a little bit,” Butler explained. “So we decided to gather a crew and bring it back.”
Or at least sort of. The new installment — now available on YouTube — isn’t actually a third season of “Provo’s Most Eligible.”
“It’s a different kind of spin that we’re calling ‘The Altar,’” Butler explained. “The Altar” features 10 single men from Utah Valley and 10 single women who hope to couple up over three rounds. In the third round, two contestants are crowned the winning couple.
Butler and his co-producers Alex McBride, Hannah Gulbrandsen and Ross, received over 1,500 applications from single adults hoping to be on the show. They managed to whittle the number down to 20 contestants with a range of backgrounds and personalities and one commonallty — “They’re all people from Utah who’ve been through the horrors of Utah dating,” Butler said.
I’ve now watched the first two episodes of “The Altar” and am impressed with the production quality and original format. And I’m still cringing. A lot. Which Butler anticipated. “It’s the same kind of quirkiness and we’re still poking fun at the stereotypes of dating in Utah,” he told me. “And we are picking on ourselves a little bit. We’re not taking ourselves too seriously.”
Not taking yourself too seriously, I think, was the key to surviving the early BYU dating days. It is, after all, hard to take eating a baked potato on a cafeteria tray next to another recent high school graduate seriously. And that’s what made it fun, and although cringey, endearing looking back. That’s the same kind of feeling “Provo’s Most Eligible” and now “The Altar” provide. A loving cringe, and nostalgia for one of the most fun times of life.