Two years before The Bachelor joined our TV landscape, viewers at the turn of the millennium were treated to a bachelor contest of a very different (and very odd) sort: On October 2, 2000, Fox aired The Sexiest Bachelor in America, a competition with the glitz of a Miss USA pageant, but this time featuring males and hosted by Caroline Rhea. Fifty-one single men — one from every state plus Washington, D.C. — paraded across the stage in swimsuits and tuxedos, showed off their “talents” and answered interview questions for a shot at $100,000 and the title of Sexiest Bachelor in America. Though the contest itself was a bit strange, the strangest part was what some of the contestants went on to do with the rest of their lives — one became a TV star, one wrote a book that inspired one of the biggest films of the 2010s … and one was arrested for murder.