The Bachelor's Chris Harrison isn't looking for someone to give his final rose to. He found her long ago. But he only recently found the perfect place to take her and their two young children: the City of Light.
It's a brisk autumn night in Paris as Chris Harrison and his family gather in the Trocadéro, the area overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Harrison's two children - son Joshua, four, and daughter Taylor, two - scamper about, oblivious to the cold, as Harrison talks about The Bachelor, the show he has hosted since 2002. This season unfolds in the City of Light, where Harrison and his family lived while he was filming the show last fall. Last night, Harrison shivered near this very spot until midnight as they shot the show's opening sequence.

"It was freezing," Harrison says, blowing into his gloves for warmth. "But this is going to be a good season. We've gone back to basics." That's a good thing for a franchise that was threatening to wear thin after a three-seasons-a-year rotation and 1,000 hot tubs. This time, however, The Bachelor has taken a break from the network schedule and abandoned the no-rules gimmickry of last season. They have eschewed near-­celebrities and professional football players for a good-natured, good-looking (but of course!) ER doctor from Nashville named Travis Stork. "He's a wonderful guy," Harrison says.

Come on. You say that about all the bachelors.

"No," he says, rocking on his toes. "No, I really don't."

In the world of entertainment, Harrison has a pretty singular job. Like Survivor host Jeff Probst and American Idol's Ryan Seacrest, Harrison is a celebrity without being a personality. He is, quite simply, "that guy from The Bachelor," good-­looking but not threatening, polite but not a pushover. Raised in Dallas, Harrison fit the wholesome middle-American profile the producers­ wanted: He married his college sweetheart, Gwen, at the tender age of 22, and, after Chris's career as an Oklahoma sportscaster, which he parlayed into a job hosting a horse-racing network in LA, the couple started a family. "The producers wanted someone you'd never perceive as hitting on the women," Chris says. Then he adds, with a wink to his wife, "I do all that behind the scenes."