Can the Bachelor Franchise Heal Its Broken Heart?

Bachelor in Paradise season 10 opens with destruction. Amidst a sea of overturned lounge chairs, host Jesse Palmer lays out how things have changed this year: Production has swapped the critter-infested bunk beds of Mexico’s Playa Escondida for individual rooms at a sleek, air-conditioned Costa Rica resort. The contestants will be subjected to game show–style challenges and, for the first time ever, the season’s victors could get a cash prize (as well as an engagement ring). Things have shifted so dramatically that at one point during Monday’s premiere, a cast member declares, “I forgot we were on The Bachelor.”

These days, the entire Bachelor enterprise is having an identity crisis. A franchise that was revolutionary in the early aughts has become a relic in the reality TV dating landscape. Worse, previous efforts to reinvent The Bachelor and its spin-offs have proven futile. The shows have changed showrunners twice since 2023, and, until very recently, neither The Bachelor nor The Bachelorette had been officially renewed by ABC.

The landmark 10th season of Bachelor in Paradise debuts in the shadow of Love Island, and ahead of another worthy opponent—season three of Netflix’s Perfect Match, which nabbed two former Bachelor Nation leads as cast members. “It’s virtually impossible to turn this entire franchise around in a single season of Paradise,” says Chad Kultgen, coauthor of How to Win the Bachelor and host of the Game of Roses podcast, which breathlessly chronicles every aspect of the franchise—from episode recaps to the social media activity of individual contestants. “We’re at a fork in the road, and BIP season 10 is the fork.”

It’s a moment of creative reckoning for a juggernaut that once wrote the rules for group dating as televised sport—but now struggles to keep up with its imitators. “The formula was perfect,” says Kultgen. “There was no real competition in other reality dating formats—no Love Island, no Love Is Blind. Once those shows start coming in, they understand how to make contemporary reality dating formats way better than Bachelor does. They’re just picking the bones of a dying dinosaur.”

Mike Fleiss, a second cousin of renowned former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, conceived of The Bachelor in 2002—a social experiment in which roughly two dozen women would compete for the affections of America’s most eligible man. The show’s first suitor was Alex Michel, a Harvard and Stanford-educated businessman whose journey to find love brought in 9.9 million viewers at the onset, with viewership nearly doubling by the finale. Fans tuned in to see Michel’s whirlwind romance with Amanda Marsh—the couple split mere months into their real-life relationship—and to witness the utter heartbreak of his runner-up Trista Rehn, whose public misfortune catapulted her into the 2003 spin-off, The Bachelorette.

There have been 28 additional seasons of The Bachelor since then, as well as 20 more seasons of The Bachelorette, 10 total seasons of Bachelor in Paradise, and a smattering of other spin-offs—ranging from the dearly departed Big Brother–esque game show Bachelor Pad to the recently launched Golden Bachelor, which offers seniors a second chance at love. There have been splashy televised wedding specials, on-air gender reveals, several Saturday Night Live parodies, and even an Emmy-nominated scripted drama from a former Bachelor producer.

“I like to take a topic that someone says, ‘You can’t put that on TV,’ and then I put it on TV,” Fleiss told Vanity Fair in 2003. “I want to feel a little bit dangerous, a tiny bit irresponsible probably, and that usually equals controversy. And that’s sort of my stock-in-trade.”

The franchise reached its peak power around 2019, according to Kultgen and his coauthor/fellow podcast host Lizzy Pace—around the time Hannah Brown was the Bachelorette and Peter Weber was the Bachelor. Back then, says Pace, “I feel like everyone was watching the show.”

The numbers back that up: Brown, her runner-up Tyler Cameron, and Weber’s runner-up Madison Prewett are some of the most-followed Bachelor Nation contestants on social media. “That was an era where you could pretty reliably guarantee the top four players of any season were going to hit a million Instagram followers,” says Kultgen. A Paradise victory lap promised even larger followings.

But as Kultgen and Pace see it, trouble was already brewing even then. Season 18 of The Bachelor had presented Juan Pablo Galavis as the so-called “first villain Bachelor” after multiple contestants called him out for making dismissive or demeaning remarks. His unfiltered behavior was good for schadenfreude—and earned great ratings—while also releasing a poison that slowly eroded the rest of the franchise. More and more, says Pace, it seems producers are trying to actively break down contestants for the sake of manufacturing drama—which moves the show farther and farther away from its original premise. “It’s supposed to be the most eligible person in the country dating all of the most eligible people,” an escapist lark—not a toxic environment that sparks outrage and social media vitriol. The franchise’s demise is “sad to see because we’re super fans of The Bachelor—clearly.”

There’s a material cost to that negative tone too. “You have this tier of elite players who are now going to other games”—like Clayton Echard and Rachel Recchia moving to Perfect Match—“because The Bachelor treats them like shit,” says Kultgen. “I’ll never forget Pilot Pete [Peter Weber] talking about how good The Traitors treated him. He didn’t say explicitly in opposition to Bachelor, but what else could he be talking about?”

After its Brown/Weber-era peak—and a few uneven COVID-era seasons—the franchise cut ties with Fleiss in 2023. (He remains credited as the creator.) The baton was passed to series vets Claire Freeland, Jason Ehrlich, and Bennett Graebner, who led the franchise to a few highs—and a disastrous low. The Bachelorette season 21—which was led by the franchise’s first-ever Asian American lead, Jenn Tran—ended with Tran being repeatedly humiliated on live TV as she was forced to relive her breakup with the man she thought she’d spend the rest of her life with, the now publicly disgraced Devin Strader.

“You’re watching your lead basically say, ‘I’m held captive. I’m a prisoner to the whims of these people who want to torture me,’” says Kultgen. “That moment, I think, had a lot of people just dumping the franchise.” Freeland and Graebner exited the show in March after being accused of presiding over a toxic and hostile workplace. (An attorney for the pair said they were “stunned and saddened by some of the things they are hearing now for the first time.”) Ehrlich left as well, reportedly some time after The Golden Bachelor’s inaugural season in January 2024.

Amid the leadership reshuffle, ABC paused The Bachelorette and delayed its official renewal of The Bachelor until this past June. Kultgen, who spoke with VF before that announcement, says the top brass “don’t understand that it’s the players that make the sport—it’s never the other way around. Your superstar players are what make the show good, and Love Island is proving that.”

That’s a common theme in conversation with Kultgen and Pace, who uses the Love Island villa as her Zoom background. “Love Island USA is redefining reality television, period,” says Kultgen. “It’s the biggest show maybe in the history of humanity in terms of how many people are watching it.” (And how much time they’re spending with it: more than one billion minutes in the week after its season seven debut.) “The cultural influence—to me, it’s the evolution of everything me and Lizzy have always been talking about, where [reality TV] is a sport.”

So, how can The Bachelor turn it all around? Kultgen suggests outsourcing. “They should take any single guy from Love Island season seven—he’s the next Bachelor. They have done the work for you, made these people superstars in the reality dating TV format. That’s how they should be thinking.”

“I have no evidence of this, but I think they’re doing the opposite,” he adds. “I think they’re saying, ‘Fuck Love Island. We have our own thing going here.’”

Former Bachelorette contestant and returning Paradise bartender Wells Adams doesn’t put it in those exact terms. But clearly, Bachelor imitators like Love Island USA touch a nerve. “All the other shows ripped off our show, so they’re all imposters and we are the real deal, and we’ve been doing it for a lot longer,” he tells me at a launch event for the series in lower Manhattan. Adams pauses. “But that’s not to say that we can’t learn things from other shows, which I think that we have.”

And not a moment too soon. Adams was shocked when a recent Paradise contestant recognized him not from his time in the Bachelor-verse, but from Adams’s stint on The Traitors. “So that concerned me a bit, that he hadn’t seen the show that he was currently on.”

A revamp is particularly overdue for Bachelor in Paradise, which had been on hiatus since season nine ended with series-low ratings in 2023. “If I’m being honest, the show needed a new skin,” Adams tells Vanity Fair. He credits new showrunner Scott Teti, best known for executive producing Bravo’s fun-in-the-sun series Summer House, with “putting a new spin on classic IP.”

Adams and Teti headline this season alongside Hannah Brown, the very popular Bachelorette who has also won both Dancing With the Stars and Special Forces. Later in the season, cast members from The Golden Bachelor and Golden Bachelorette will hit the sand for the first time. “I know there are going to be [members of] hardcore Bachelor Nation that are used to what they’ve always seen,” Palmer says, “but I’m really excited about how the show looks and feels moving forward. There were a lot of unknowns. We were sort of—I don’t want to say flying by the seat of our pants, but we didn’t necessarily always know what to expect.”

Network TV can’t compete with the Hunger Games–esque exploits of Love Island, a show that films in real time and is influenced by live audience votes. Nor can it be as risqué: Bachelor in Paradise “can’t show those close-ups of butts like Love Island does. They have to put a black box over it,” says Pace. “Sad.”

But the powers that be still promise plenty of heat, even if some of it comes from contestants with AARP cards. “I never in a million years thought that the ‘Goldens’ would have more energy and be a better party than the younger cast, but they were,” says Palmer. “They showed up to Paradise at about 10:15 in the morning, and they were doing body shots off each other at, like, 10:19.”

Adds Adams, “The Goldens gave zero Fs. Their parents aren’t watching this back home, so they don’t care. And I like that. That’s how you should do the show—with a little bit of reckless abandon. That’s what love is anyway. The Goldens epitomize what Paradise is so much more than the young cast did. And I really hope that comes across on TV, because it came across huge behind the bar.”

It’s still not clear how the Golden and regular dating pools will mingle, or what, exactly, Brown will be doing on the show. In the premiere, we see her popping a champagne bottle and chatting with cast members about their dating preferences; that’s about it. “I’m really there to just keep the vibes right,” she says. “If they need a shoulder to cry on, I’m there pouring champagne. I think it’s really great to have a female presence there to give a different perspective.”

For years now, says Brown, Bachelor-verse contestants have been too afraid of social media backlash to really connect with wider audiences. “What worked for me is I didn’t grow up really watching The Bachelor or Bachelorette. So I was just there living my life—the good, the bad, the ugly. And I think that made me a full human that people could root for. Sometimes I was the villain, sometimes I was the hero. It’s harder to do now, but that is the secret sauce—being fully yourself without regard for what that could look like. When you try to be perfect, you’re not going to make your mark.”

Did the contestants on season 10 of Paradise heed Brown’s advice? “I did my best,” she says with a smile. “I don’t know how many people listened to me.”

Another pressing question—will this season of Paradise produce our next Bachelor? “There’s always the possibility,” says Palmer, a twinkle in his eye.

The Game of Roses hosts suspect Dale Moss, best known for very rapidly winning the affections of Bachelorette Clare Crawley, is being primed for the gig. They hope whoever is named Bachelor has a smoother launch than upcoming Golden Bachelor Mel Owens, who sparked controversy after a podcast appearance where he declared his dating dealbreakers: wigs, artificial hips, and any woman over the age of 60. He is 66.

“The Mel O. thing is so disappointing, shocking. The franchise is in disarray, and I think that’s what has allowed this to happen,” says Pace. “If I were them, I would instantly recast. That’s such a villainous quote that it’s hard to come back from.” Kultgen agrees: “Every player who’s coming into that season has potentially heard this clip. I think that season is… I don’t want to say it’s DOA before it’s even started, but Jesus, how can you think anything else?”

Spoiler site Reality Steve has reported that ABC has plans to replace Owens, but a source tells Vanity Fair no such arrangement exists; we’ve reached out to the network for comment. When asked about the podcast, Palmer told Us Weekly, “We haven’t started filming Golden yet, so I haven’t spent a ton of time with Mel. The small amount of time I have spent with him, he seems like a good guy. But I know I’m gonna get to spend a lot more time with him pretty soon. I’m sure that’s something we’re going to talk about.”

Owens is emblematic of a larger issue with problematic contestants on reality TV dating shows, says Kultgen: “He’s good on paper. He’s a square-jawed, ex-NFL, current lawyer, white dude with a nice set of white teeth. And that’s it. There is this old-school mentality in a lot of these productions still that’s like, We control the narrative. Whatever we put on that screen is what people will believe, and fuck everything else. Ignore, ignore, ignore.”

Take it from Love Island season seven, which was bookended with two contestants—Yulissa Escobar and Cierra Ortega—being booted from the show for alleged offensive social media activity. (Escobar has apologized, and Ortega’s family has made a statement asking for compassion.) “You control the thing you’re putting out in front of us, but we will figure everything else about it before it even airs,” says Kultgen. “So, to have that mentality that you can just sweep everything under the rug—there ain’t no more rug. We took it away with the internet.”

Nevertheless, both Pace and Kultgen are cautiously optimistic about the future of Bachelor in Paradise, and the franchise more generally—though that might be because they have a vested interest. For three years, Kultgen has been privately coaching Bachelor contestants. He won’t confirm or deny how many clients he’s got in the current season, saying only this: “In terms of my knowledge of what actually happened on the beach, season 10 is the greatest body of knowledge I’ve had.”

Bachelor in Paradise’s success —and the franchise’s livelihood—will hinge on ratings and the launch of an exciting new Bachelor. But the true test will be how it captures the public’s imagination. “Can it approach even a 10th of the level of cultural significance that Love Island USA has? The most recent Bachelor, Grant Ellis, has about 180,000 Instagram followers. People are beating that overnight on Love Island. So if Bachelor in Paradise can’t crack into the mamacita memes, it’s dead in the water,” says Kultgen. “When any player comes to me and says, ‘I want to go into The Bachelor,’ I now tell them to go to Love Island instead.”