The newest Bachelorette season is canceled, right on the cusp of its premiere — and it may inadvertently spell the end of the franchise.
This season was slated to debut on Sunday with Taylor Frankie Paul, star of the Hulu reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, in the title spot. Everything about the 22nd season’s marketing signaled that it was a new era: Paul is an established reality TV star on another Disney-owned franchise, not a veteran of The Bachelor, as almost all of her predecessors were. And the show was moving from its typical weeknight slot to a coveted Sunday primetime airing.
Then allegations against Paul of domestic violence resurfaced in the week leading up to the premiere. ABC appeared to be doing its best to salvage the season, sending Paul out on Good Morning America on Wednesday morning. (“I’m a person that will always speak my truth,” she told host Lara Spencer in the interview. “That’s what I’m known for. So when the time is right, I will be.”) But after TMZ published a 2023 video on Thursday that showed Paul throwing a chair during an argument with her former partner Dakota Mortensen while her child cried nearby, the network decided to cancel the season three days before it was supposed to start. (Later on Thursday, Mortensen filed for a restraining order against Paul.)
So what was supposed to be a fresh start for The Bachelor franchise — a series that helped usher in reality TV’s golden era when it debuted in 2002 — has instead spiraled into one of the worst PR debacles yet for a show that seems to specialize in them. As its ratings fall and other shows take up the mantle of must-see reality TV, I find myself as a viewer asking: Is it time for the Bachelor to be over?
The Bachelor has been besieged by controversies and audience disinterest for a while
The first season of the Bachelor franchise that I watched was Colton Underwood’s in 2019 — in which the lead became so exasperated by the pressure he was under that he literally leaped over a fence to try to escape. It was riveting television and so memorable that it was still inspiring thoughtful essays from high-minded cultural websites like Bright Wall/Dark Room years later.
But, with the benefit of hindsight, Colton’s season may have also been the beginning of the end of a franchise that has become too toxic to continue.
He ended the season with Cassie Randolph, but their relationship quickly ended and the situation then turned dark: Randolph alleged Underwood had been stalking her, even putting a tracker on her car, and she filed a restraining order. The Bachelor universe was always premised on a fairly traditional view of gender roles and sexuality — it was, after all, centered on pushing young heterosexual couples into an engagement within a matter of weeks — and audience interest dwindled as the world moved forward, particularly once we entered the Me Too era that challenged long-held relationship norms.
Meanwhile, the show had always been blindingly white, and in the years that followed Colton’s season, the Bachelor’s uncomfortable relationship with race also made it seem increasingly out of touch. The season with the franchise’s first Black Bachelor, Matt James, ended with him choosing Rachel Kirkconnell…who, as it turned out, had attended a plantation-themed party while in college. Longtime host Chris Harrison came to Kirkconnell’s defense and made his own racially insensitive comments in the process, in an interview with franchise veteran Rachel Lindsay, the first Black Bachelorette, who herself has accused the show of being a toxic environment. A fierce backlash followed — and Harrison was forced to step down.
The last time I wrote about The Bachelorette was in 2024, when the show put its lead, Jenn Tran, through an embarrassing and shameful spectacle after her engagement to Devin Strader disintegrated. The treatment of Tran, the first Asian American lead of the show, made it feel like the show was nearing the point of no return.
Paul’s casting was, in my eyes, a desperate last grasp for relevance. The culture that franchise helped to create seemed to have passed it by. Love Is Blind and Love Island command much more attention. The audience for the Bachelor shows has shrunk to less than half the size they were a decade ago and a fraction what they were back in the 2000s. Meanwhile, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives had such a strong debut after its first eight episodes dropped on Hulu in 2024 that the network renewed it and ordered 20 more within a month of the premiere. It makes sense that ABC thought Paul could pull in viewers, despite the fact that she was arrested for domestic violence in 2023, and despite rampant fan speculation that she was secretly in a relationship or at least emotionally unavailable while filming The Bachelorette.
Now that franchise reboot is over before it had even begun. The Bachelor franchise has always been a problematic farce, but at its best, the drama was low stakes — over shrimp, for example — and, at times, riveting. I’ll never forget watching Colton leap that fence. It was raw and captivating, everything we ask reality TV to be for our entertainment.
But as the controversies have piled up, and now a lead contestant’s alleged domestic violence caught on camera, it’s become impossible to simply enjoy the mess and ignore the real-life trauma behind it. Maybe the world doesn’t need The Bachelor anymore.
