Another season of “The Bachelorette” is underway on ABC, and The New York Times is still here for the right reasons. Our resident obsessives are following Rachel Lindsay’s love journey while saying farewell to two men the audience could barely tell apart. Can we steal you for a sec?

CARYN GANZ “The Bachelor” franchise started out as a fable of upward mobility — a man of stature known for his wealth was up for grabs, and a cast of women fought to claim a place at the end of a “fairy tale” as a bride.

Over the years, the show moved away from casting a rich person as the object of affection (early Bachelors included business heirs, financial whizzes and semifamous actors, all of whom were understood to be affluent), and instead chose a protagonist from the previous season’s “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” who had proved himself or herself to have the charisma and the ability to hold the audience’s attention. While this has resulted in a succession of white romantic leads (something NPR’s Linda Holmes has written about and that we noted in our Bachelorette Bible), it also caused a flattening of the show’s class politics. The emphasis shifted from the wealth of the Bachelor or Bachelorette to the lavishness of the dates the show sent them on, which disproportionately feature international travel and helicopter rides.

Over the last few seasons, class has been made less of an issue on the show than ever — from the playful way hopefuls’ careers have been described (the memorable, “aspiring dolphin trainer”) to the relatively folksy way people from outside big cities have been portrayed. (Like Raven from the most recent season of “The Bachelor,” who operated a “fashion boutique” in a town of fewer than 3,000 people.)