Taylor Frankie Paul’s “Bachelorette” season was shaping up to be the Most Dramatic Season Ever. Now, it will go down in history as the Most Dramatic Season to Never Exist.
In September, the decision to cast 31-year-old Paul, a TikToker and the star of Hulu’s hit reality series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” as the next Bachelorette was framed as a groundbreaking change of pace for the famously risk-averse juggernaut. The long-running franchise’s ratings have been in steady decline since the late 2010s, so things were finally dire enough to cast their first lead from outside the franchise. Enter Paul, a messy single mom whose exploits on “Mormon Wives” had already buoyed ABC’s Disney-owned sister network to record-breaking ratings.
It was a surprisingly big swing for the network that was praised for promising to breathe new life into the franchise. But when you swing that big, you have to be ready to whiff spectacularly.
That’s what happened on Wednesday, when the network made the decision to pull the plug on Paul’s season of “The Bachelorette” amid a police investigation into a February incident of alleged domestic violence between Paul and her ex, Dakota Mortensen, and the leak of a disturbing video from Paul’s previously reported altercation with Mortensen in 2023.
Never mind the gauntlets of already-completed press, the estimated $8.2 million in TV promos, or the fact that the season had already wrapped filming and was set to premiere in three days’ time. The dream was over for Paul.
Perhaps it’s time the dream of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” is, too.
Casting Taylor Frankie Paul was always going to be risky
Chaos has always been Paul’s brand. Before Paul was poised to be the star of not one but two television shows, she was the self-destructive and eminently watchable leader of MomTok, a loose collection of Mormon moms who make TikToks together in Utah. Though the women gained followings for their perfect barrel curls and silly dancing videos, it was a bombshell 2022 video of Paul admitting to “soft swinging” with other members of MomTok and their husbands that catapulted her and her circle of friends to infamy — and got them a Hulu reality show.
Hulu learned early in filming “Mormon Wives” that the very qualities that made Paul a compelling reality-television character would also make her a liability. In 2023, the show paused production when Paul was arrested after an altercation with Mortensen and was charged with aggravated assault, child abuse, and domestic violence in the presence of a child. She pleaded guilty to the aggravated assault charge — a third-degree felony — in exchange for the other charges being dropped, and entered a plea of abeyance for 36 months, after which time the charge would be lessened to a misdemeanor if she abided by the terms of her probation.
“Mormon Wives” chronicles this incident in its very first episode, airing police bodycam footage of a distraught Paul being arrested at her home in Utah. The next episode picks up a year later, with Paul pregnant with Mortensen’s child and the couple back together. (Their child, Ever True, was born in March 2024.)
Throughout the show’s four seasons, Paul has emerged as one of the most compelling, frustrating, and mesmerizing characters on reality television. She takes the arrest and subsequent therapy and treatment hard, sobbing onscreen in moments that feel too private to be broadcast to the world. She repeatedly admits to being at fault in the 2023 incident in interviews and on “Mormon Wives.”
She prostrates herself so deeply at the altar of accountability that she can only counterbalance it by doing something so self-destructive — posting shady TikToks about her friends, sleeping with Mortensen the night before leaving to film “The Bachelorette” — that she’s forced to repeat the cycle anew.
That’s all to say that ABC should have seen this coming. The fact that they didn’t or couldn’t course-correct in time underscores the Bachelor Nation’s Achilles’ heel: inflexibility.
After over 50 seasons of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” combined, plus dozens more spinoffs, the franchise has done precious little to evolve as the pool of reality dating shows has become increasingly crowded. Its efforts to increase racial diversity among the cast have backfired several times, and its format of dates and rose ceremonies has remained almost entirely unchanged over two decades. A change in showrunners and a new aesthetic for the 10th season of the spinoff “Bachelor in Paradise” caused a minor stir, mostly serving as a reminder of just how stale the flagship series has become by comparison.
For all the promo material that boasted Paul’s “Bachelorette” season would “break the mold,” ABC dropped their star the moment her signature brand of chaos — not to mention her previously known 2023 arrest, which acts as part of her origin story on season one of “Mormon Wives” — became a drawback to the network instead of a selling point.
Whatever you think of the leaked video, of Paul and Mortensen’s relationship dynamic, and whether either of them should have a platform or be on reality television while both openly battling issues with addiction and mental health, the fact remains that “The Bachelorette” tried and failed to have it both ways. The most frustrating part is that the franchise may learn the wrong lesson from the fiasco.
‘The Bachelor’ franchise needs to stop pretending its leads are role models
From the moment a gaggle of women stepped out of the limo in the series’ groundbreaking 2002 premiere, “The Bachelor” has been committed to selling the idea of a romantic fairy tale. Red roses are currency toward earning the man or woman of your dreams. Contestants talk about meeting the love of their life, of the engagement they’ve been dreaming of since they were little girls. Overnight dates are still called the “Fantasy Suites.”
While two-plus decades of competitive romance have softened some of the franchise’s buzzwords into meta-commentary on the show itself (who is “here for the right reasons?“), the show’s operating principle still rests on the idea that its lead is the most perfect person worthy of “finding love.”
The concept of casting a complex, deeply flawed woman as a romantic lead was inspired and would no doubt have made for a compelling season of television. But the show chose Paul without considering the shackles it would inherently place on her. Bachelor Nation viewers still expect leads to be unimpeachable role models — Taylor Frankie Paul was a fascinating choice because she got famous precisely because she is not.
Where this leaves “The Bachelorette,” ABC, Paul, Mortensen, and the rest of the “Mormon Wives” cast remains to be seen. Disney Entertainment, Paul, and Mortensen have all released statements that emphasize they will be “focusing on family” amid the news; filming for the fifth season of “Mormon Wives” is currently on pause.
But as the dust settles in Hollywood and Salt Lake City, Paul shouldn’t be the only one doing some repenting. Scrapping the season shouldn’t teach ABC brass that risks aren’t worth taking. It should show them that if they’re going to shake up the franchise, they can’t expect one woman’s unpredictable personality to provide an advertiser-safe earthquake that will do the work of dozens of top producers and executives.
If the franchise is going to stay afloat, it needs to find something new, entertaining, and poignant to say about modern dating and the concept of a happy ending. At one time, Paul’s casting represented a chance to do exactly that. Pulling her season shows the network was more interested in juicing ratings, as long as the outcome wasn’t as messy as its lead. Perhaps it’s time to question if ABC cast her for the wrong reasons.
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