What Do We Want From Bachelor Nation?

Bachelor Nation is in crisis. The venerable reality dating franchise has been dogged in the past few years by scandal after scandal, flashier competitions getting more buzz, and, most egregiously, boringness. Ask any passing Bachelor fan how the most recent seasons have been and you’ll likely be met with a hearty shrug of ambivalence. To be fair, the TV landscape looks much different in 2023 than it did in 2002, when the first season of The Bachelor aired — hell, The Bachelor looks unrecognizable from its 2002 self with multiple spinoffs spawning an entire microindustry of influencers whose careers are based on their proximity to Bachelor Nation. Keeping up with the shows can feel like a full-time job. There are podcasts and blogs and stan accounts and recaps (hi!). But to what end? Following the season-20 premiere of The Bachelorette, Vulture’s resident evangelists (and, yes, apologists) Devon Ivie and Emily Palmer Heller gathered to discuss the state of the franchise as well as our hopes and suggestions for its future.

Devon Ivie: It’s become evident over the past few seasons that Bachelor Nation’s viewership is waning. You can feel it in the lukewarm real-time social-media chatter, and see it in the cold, hard facts of ratings. I miss the quality of meme/news cycle that used to churn out with every episode. Why do we think this is happening?

Emily Palmer Heller: I’ve been experiencing that. People in my life who are passing Bachelor fans are like, “Oh, I haven’t been watching. I’ve heard it’s gotten pretty bad.” It hasn’t gotten bad; it just doesn’t know what it wants to be.

DI: A proper crisis of identity.

EPH: Part of the problem is shows like Love Is Blind and Love Island are much more gimmicky, which allow them to be more straightforward about how silly this all is, while The Bachelor franchise is still trying to sell us on the romantic fantasy. It’s still trying to convince us that this is a normal way to meet people and have a big, romantic love story. Love Is Blind and Love Island still have successful couples, but they’re much more interested in playing with the ridiculousness of the dating-competition concept. The Bachelor keeps messing with its formula because it doesn’t know how to grapple with that ridiculousness.

DI: The last time a Bachelorette lead married her winner was the relentlessly wonderful Rachel Lindsay, while Matt James and Zach Shallcross — who were mocked for their boring seasons — are still with their winners. There’s no correlation between how entertaining a lead is and their romantic success. But to your point, think about the last time this franchise made an active decision to change its formula: It was Gabby Windey and Rachel Recchia’s dual Bachelorette season, where the producers put the burden on them to develop their own framework for how it would work. Imagine that! Hey, we’re going to present you ladies with an opportunity to grow and change this format, but we’re doing nothing on our end to help you. In hindsight, Clare Crawley deserves major credit for leaving in the way she did. You can put that on the Mount Rushmore of Bachelor Nation Endings.

EPH: For Gabby and Rachel’s season, the producers weren’t producing. Part of the fun of these shows is in figuring out how stories get told; I always like to say that these shows aren’t scripted, but they are written. I think the producers have gotten really gun shy after receiving so much backlash for things like a bad vetting process, overserving contestants, and fumbling issues around consent, and now they’re nervous to actually produce. So now we’re just watching the same stories over and over again. That’s not interesting. I don’t want to see another story line about someone who’s there to just get followers. Let’s be honest, that’s the reason you’re all here. It’s actually more insane to be like, “I’m here to find a wife,” than to be like, “Yeah, I want to quit my job and become an influencer and this seems like an easy way to do it.”

DI: After the whole Rachael Kirkconnell controversy, it almost felt like viewers were becoming producers in their own right. They vetted a contestant and unearthed consequential information that these hired professionals failed to do. That tells you everything you need to know.

EPH: Part of why it’s less fun for me to watch now is that the fan conversation has become so much about digging up gossip on people and the show.

DI: Yeah, like “gotcha” sleuthing.

EPH: The show expects me to keep up with that? I remember during “Women Tell All” last season, Jesse Palmer brought something up as if all of America knew what was happening, about one of the contestants having defended blackface in the past. I don’t really follow the blogs so I was just sitting there like, “Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You need to tell me what you’re talking about.”

Ivie: People aren’t online all the time. I’m not. But there are parallel shows happening simultaneously, the one that ABC is airing and then whatever is going on in the internet abyss. To get the full experience, you now have to follow both of them.

EPH: The show is canon. Everything happening outside of it is not. I understand that doing the digging is a fun activity for a lot of people, but that’s not how I enjoy the show. To make that a necessary part of the viewing experience is really frustrating and alienating to a lot of people.

DI: That brings us to the big question: What do viewers actually want from this franchise at this point? When it’s an anomaly of a season if there’s a love connection that lasts, and everyone is going on the show to seek fame and play their luck with a new career opportunity, should we just view it as an amusing social experiment?

EPH: When The Bachelor started, they actually tried to find “the most eligible bachelor” in America and match him with women who were compatible. There was an expectation of a long-term relationship. Now it’s just an incestuous influencer parade. The roots of this show aren’t even in consideration anymore; it’s just about who makes good TV. And I don’t necessarily need that to change — I want to watch good TV! My mother-in-law has said to me, “I don’t like the way you guys watch this show,” by which she meant analyzing people’s behavior in the context of a reality dating show. For me, the armchair relationship diagnostics is the interesting part; I enjoy watching people try to communicate their feelings in a very high-pressure environment. “Oh, they didn’t handle that very well.” “Oh, that was actually really mature. I liked that.” That’s fun to me. The romantic fantasy isn’t interesting to me at all, but I think the show believes that’s what the audience wants. They’re trying to sell the fantasy, but we know this isn’t how successful relationships are built.

DI: This reminds of something Trista Sutter told me a few months ago. As part of the franchise’s foundational love story, she immediately validated the process and gave contestants something to look up to as a gold standard for two decades. She still believes that true love can be found on the show, and suggested instead of recycling through previous contestants, someone should be plucked from obscurity again as a reboot of sorts. What do you think of a change like that?

EPH: I don’t like the idea of a total reboot. I watch The Bachelor and The Bachelorette like spring training for Bachelor in Paradise. I like having recurring characters who we get to see grow and change, for better or worse. But I do like the idea of the lead being someone we’ve never met before. That’s a very fun idea.

Something that’s been bugging me for a while is the feeling that once you’re the Bachelor or Bachelorette, you’re done with Bachelor Nation. You can’t come back for another try. If it didn’t work for you, sorry, that was your chance. Once you’ve been the main character or once you’ve gotten engaged on the show, if you break up, it didn’t work for you, that’s it. It’s the flip side to the other accusation that gets thrown around a lot is, “Oh, this person is only here to become the next Bachelor or Bachelorette.” Which is fine. If you want to go to the show, go to the show.

DI: We need to retire some phrases at this point. “They’re not there for the right reasons.” Who is? “They just want to be the lead.” Who doesn’t? We can joke about how repetitive the cycle is, but when the same exact things are being said for the past ten or so years, that’s a failure of production. The seasons blur together because it’s the same conflict every time.

EPH: There’s no variation in the drama. From the first episode of season 20, it seems like Charity is doing a good job of avoiding some of those pitfalls, but expecting her to “fix” an entire broken franchise is unfair.

DI: Speaking of expectations to fix the franchise, Jesse Palmer is now comfortably into his reign as new host. If we were to give him a performance review, what would it be? Honestly, this whole transition away from Chris Harrison made me realize how inessential the job was. Chris wasn’t an Alex Trebek or Pat Sajak figurehead. The job doesn’t even require a skill set of specific knowledge like Padma Lakshmi brought to Top Chef. Jesse shows up, stands around, makes a few comments, and leaves. That’s all the job was, besides being an occasional sounding board for contestants, who seemed to only do it by requirement.

EPH: That’s interesting because for a while it seemed like the producers, like you say, wanted the host to be a real confidante for the lead. But it was less of a consideration for the lead and more a way to get story lines out there. It was very clear by the end of Chris’s tenure that he was checked out. My husband would always joke, “This man put his suit on five minutes ago and has a cocktail ready on the side.” He was hitting his mark and then he was out. So I do appreciate that Jesse is trying to do a good job, though I think you’re right that the host doesn’t need to be as much of a main character. But here’s another thought: There’s no reason that the different versions of the show can’t have different hosts. If Jesse Palmer hosts The Bachelor, Tayshia and Caitlyn can host The Bachelorette. I very much enjoyed the coven vibes they brought to the show.

DI: It seemed like they wanted to foster a genuine sisterhood.

EPH: And then we could have rotating celebrity guest hosts for Bachelor in Paradise. I’ll admit that if I were producing this show, I would’ve chosen Ben Higgins instead of Jesse Palmer. He was very good at being the Bachelor and I think he’d be good at being the host.

DI: I don’t know what to think of the show airing at 9 p.m. now instead of 8 p.m., but my gut tells me it’s not a good sign that ABC is burying it an hour later.

EPH: It’s not a good omen, especially given that its new lead-in is Claim to Fame. When Claim to Fame premiered, it was on after The Bachelorette, which is how I ended up watching a couple episodes while I was doing dishes afterward. So my more charitable view of that is they’re just trying to get more eyes on a newer reality show.

DI: As long as I continue to see bite-size previews for The Good Doctor keeping me up to date on Dr. Shaun Murphy’s life, I have no complaints. The man has come a long way. I’m really proud of him. He’s married with a baby now. I wonder if he knows he has the entire Bachelor Nation rooting for him.

EPH: Good for Dr. Murphy. I haven’t watched more than ten minutes of that show, but I’m happy for him.