A New Beginning For ‘The Bachelor’: How The Franchise Is Moving On From Years Of Controversy With The Help Of Its ‘Golden’ Ratings Success

After years of controversies as ratings steadily declined, is 2023 the year The Bachelor franchise found redemption?

The prospect feels greater than ever following the outsized success of The Golden Bachelor, ABC’s ingenious senior-focused spin-off that, in its first season, saw 72-year-old Gerry Turner seize a second chance at love.

Audiences have clearly responded to this breath of fresh air, with nearly 9M tuning in for The Golden Bachelor finale after three days of multi-platform viewing, in the franchise’s best audience in almost four years. This comes following an entire season of success for the show, which has repeatedly set audience records since it debuted, with the premiere episode recently becoming ABC‘s most-watched episode of an unscripted series ever on Hulu.

The network has already announced plans to further cash in on the success of Golden by televising Turner’s wedding, a move ABC hasn’t opted for in years. Given the ways in which the franchise has been expanded over the years, a Golden Bachelorette announcement is expected sooner rather than later, if not further spin-offs centered on contestants of a certain age. Sources tell Deadline that ABC and Warner Horizon are also eyeing how the franchise can expand to include contestants of all ages, rather than continuing to skew toward people in their 20s and early 30s.

Warner Horizon’s SVP and Head of Development Bridgette Theriault confirms that she’d “absolutely love” to see Golden Bachelor spin-offs and that active discussions with ABC have already taken place, even if ABC’s unscripted chief Rob Mills cautions that the network will have to “thoughtfully consider” its next moves.

“We’d be stupid not to say, ‘What are other stories we can tell with these people?’” Mills admitted, adding: “Gerry was a story that in two seconds, everybody knew it, could relate to it, and rooted for him…The Bachelor, when it’s really working, should be the thing everybody is talking about.”

While the show has generated its fair share of buzz over the past few years, it wasn’t exactly producing the results the network was looking for. Part of this has come down, Mills said, to making storytelling choices that haven’t felt “heart-first” — or that “felt very loud, but not in the right way.”

Oftentimes, reality television can wind up far afield from anything to do with reality. Producers manipulate the situation, running interference with the cast and pushing the right buttons at the right times to create an interesting story. It’s easy to get caught up in what one thinks the audience might want to see. But go too far and you run the risk of losing them altogether.

No one wants to turn on a TV show and feel like either they or the cast are being exploited.

“Audiences are smart and sophisticated, and they can smell bullsh*t. They can smell when something is inauthentic,” said veteran Bachelor producer Bennett Graebner, who took the reins as EP and showrunner earlier this year along with Justin Ehrlich and longtime Bachelor Canada producer Claire Freeland, replacing creator Mike Fleiss.

The word ‘authenticity’ gets thrown around a lot in Hollywood, but it can often feel like an empty platitude. So what does it really mean to be authentic in the context of reality TV? From a producing standpoint, it means that all storylines on The Bachelor shows need be “connected to the underlying pursuit of finding your great love,” explained Freeland.

“I have a deep respect for the cast who come on this show,” she said. “People underestimate how difficult it is to be so open with their stories in front of all these cameras, and in front of all these lights and the broadcast for the world to see. I have such appreciation and gratitude, and I think the cast can feel that and that they know that is the case.”

Pointing out that plenty of Bachelor stars over the years have pulled back the curtain on behind-the-scenes trickery, Mills admits, “It sounds so cliche; we just needed the reality to be more real.”

The executive adds that “there’s no shortcuts or things to assume like, ‘Oh, the audience won’t know that we’re doing this.’ They do now. Don’t say, ‘We have to do this because this is how we always did it.’ Or, ‘We have to make sure that we’ve hit this beat or convention or it’s not the same format’…Just roll the cameras and let it all go.”

Naturally, this approach dialed down the fabrication of clearly artificial contestant drama purely for shock value or the prospect of ginning up ratings. Yet another lesson to be gleaned from The Golden Bachelor — and its female contestants, in particular — per Ehrlich, is that when producers support their contestants, and contestants support one another, “the audience responds.”

That’s not to say that The Golden Bachelor‘s inaugural run didn’t include its fair share of tension, and even some petty arguments. “Anytime you have multiple people vying for the love and the affection of one person, there’s going to be challenges that come along with that,” said Freeland. But overall, those golden women flocked together instead of tearing each other apart. They stayed up until the wee hours of the night laughing and talking, even when there were no cameras rolling. For the most part, they also championed each other’s connections with Turner.

Ahead of The Golden Bachelor finale, a report from The Hollywood Reporter raised questions about Turner’s background as presented on the show, including his job history and previous relationships. Addressing the situation, Turner admitted that there is “just enough truth” in the article, but called into question its timing during multiple interviews. Luckily for ABC and Warner Horizon, this fairly benign report is as scandalous as the franchise has gotten in the past few years, after a string of much more serious calamities.

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as too much drama for a reality TV show. The more spectacle, the better. But drama without a true purpose, as it turns out, is only entertaining for so long. Then it becomes tedious, and it pushes audiences away. While everyone loves a good reality TV villain, gone are the days of filling the Bachelor mansion with contestants who are more interested in the thought of besting their competition than they are in pursuing a genuine connection.

All of this is to underscore that, as much as it’s about producer conduct, bringing authenticity to The Bachelor is also very much about casting. After so many years, it would be naive to think that a majority of contestants don’t apply with personal aspirations outside of finding love, like boosting an Instagram following or becoming a TV personality — and in isolation, there’s nothing wrong with that. But the last thing the flagship shows need, season after season, is a cast full of twenty-somethings blinded by the allure of their 15 seconds of fame.

What they need is contestants that, in Bachelor parlance, are there for the right reasons — people, Ehrlich says, “who are coming here authentically looking to find love.”

Luckily for them, the EP added, “I personally really believe that they can find it here. One of my favorite things, and I tell people when they come on the show, is that not only do I believe that it can happen, but I’ve seen it happen again and again.”

Flagship series The Bachelor launched two decades ago, with lead Alex Michel, a 31-year-old management consultant from Virginia who was ready to fall in love on national television. Indeed, as the first poster for the franchise boasted, Michel was set to go “from great date to soul mate in six romantic weeks.”

The nation watched his whirlwind romance with 23-year-old event planner Amanda Marsh, and the rest is history. The pair later broke it off — as have most Bachelor Nation couples — but not before piquing the interest of audiences who bought into the fantasy. In addition to U.S. spin-offs, the franchise has since then spawned many an international iteration, as it’s charted a path for the modern dating show.

In an era of cell phone addictions, dating apps, and the pervasiveness of social media, studios have searched for a show reflecting the state of modern relationships, much in the way The Bachelor aimed to in the early 2000s. But few have succeeded in piercing the cultural zeitgeist the way that The Bachelor has continued to in its 21 years. For better or for worse, the show does get people talking.

When Theriault and SVP Unscripted Dan Sacks got involved with the franchise not too long ago, they went on what they jokingly call a listening tour. “We met with the showrunners, we met with the producers, we met with ABC, and then we went down a rabbit hole about, what do fans want? What do they feel like it’s missing? What other shows are they watching and why?” said Theriault. “And with the showrunners coming together and saying, ‘Okay, how do we fulfill on the original conceit of the franchise, which is a fairy tale romance, but kind of modernize it a bit?’”

Solving the issues plaguing The Bachelor would not just come down to tinkering with what audiences saw on screen. The franchise was also going to need to address obvious internal issues.

Freeland, Graebner, and Ehrlich took over after executive producer and creator Mike Fleiss exited after Warner Bros. TV launched a misconduct investigation into claims of alleged racist behavior, including discriminatory casting practices, as well as verbal and emotional abuse. After a conversation with Warner Bros. over the results from the investigation, he opted to leave. This was the second time that the studio had launched an investigation into Fleiss’s behavior, after a 2019 incident where they claimed to be “looking into” the “serious allegations” raised by his then-pregnant wife who accused him of attacking her.

Fleiss’ exit came amid internal divisions among the producing teams as the show aimed to change its image and embrace diversity. In a statement at the time, Fleiss admitted that “times have certainly changed and I’d have to say we didn’t keep up with the pace of those changes,” acknowledging the series “could have done more” to diversify its cast.

The Bachelor‘s approach to discussions of race has been one of its biggest weaknesses, especially in the past few years as audiences have become less likely to sweep controversy under the rug.

Although not around at the dawn of The Bachelor franchise, social media has also contributed significantly to many of the show’s issues in the past few years. Contestants nowadays have a large digital footprint that makes it easier to dig up details about a person’s past, much to the dismay of producers and network execs, who are now routinely faced with the surfacing of unfavorable information.

While Sacks confirms that properly vetting contestants is now “a huge priority” for the producers with every new season, issues in this area came to a head on the heels of 2021’s racial reckoning in the U.S., when the franchise chose to respond to criticism about its lack of diverse leads by stepping outside the box. Instead of casting a male contestant from the previous season of The Bachelorette to topline The Bachelor, the network went with a new face, making Matt James the first Black lead in the history of the series. The season quickly collapsed into a PR nightmare, though, when internet sleuths dug up a photo of James’ frontrunner, Rachael Kirkconnell, attending a plantation-themed fraternity party.

Soon after the situation with Kirkconnell exploded, the franchise’s longtime host Chris Harrison put his foot in his mouth during an interview with Rachel Lindsay, The Bachelorette’s first Black lead from Season 13, by suggesting that audiences should have “a little grace, a little understanding, a little compassion” for Kirkconnell. Lindsay was not happy, and neither was Bachelor Nation, and as dozens of former contestants flocked to social media to take her side, calls for Harrison’s removal intensified. Kirkconnell posted an apology, as did Harrison. But it wasn’t enough. In February, just over a month after the season premiere, Harrison stepped back from the franchise and, by June, he was permanently ousted as host.

This particular scandal cast a shadow on the franchise from which it’s been hard to emerge.

“The biggest producer of the show is the audience, and we were just starting to see from the audience that they were either leaving or not enjoying the show because I think they felt the heart was gone,” Mills told Deadline. “So we had to take a good look in the mirror and say, ‘Has the show lost its heart? And how do we get it back?’ I think there was a little bit of trust that we lost with the audience.”

The next few seasons felt like a cautious reset as the network again found its footing with the franchise. The Bachelorette tested out two former contestants as co-hosts in lieu of Harrison, before Jesse Palmer came in as his permanent replacement. After that, The Bachelorette cast two leads instead of one. But double the drama didn’t resonate with fans, either, as producers quickly came to understand.

Still, the franchise may finally be finding its North Star again. Before The Golden Bachelor premiered, audiences appeared cautiously optimistic as Charity Lawson led Season 20 of The Bachelorette, which delivered strong ratings for ABC over the summer. It was the first real glimpse that the producers had a full grasp on myriad pitfalls in producing the series and how to circumnavigate them to deliver the show audiences demanded.

Most notably, the season featured some of the most honest conversations about race that the show had ever seen, as Lawson discussed what it would mean for her to be in an interracial relationship, should she choose white frontrunner Joey Graziadei to be her fiancé. While she ultimately got engaged to Dotun Olubeko instead, these conversations were a far cry from the stilted dialogues about race that the show was somewhat known for, even as recently as Season 27 of The Bachelor, when a contestant of the Zach Shallcross-fronted chapter apologized on air for previously defending someone wearing blackface.

Engendering this result, Theriault says, has absolutely been intentional on executives’ part. “Inclusivity is a big word. It’s an important word and it’s something the franchise has been striving to open and be more broad with,” said the executive. “But I think with the new showrunners and with us at the helm, it became a real focus that we were casting as broadly as possible.”

Inclusivity, she said, “meant everything — all walks of life, from different body sizes, to different cultures, to obviously different colors. That has been, along with ABC, really important to just be sure that we are representing the audience.”

Over the last few years, as The Bachelor has sought to adapt and rediscover its audience, amidst the dwindling of linear TV, perhaps the ultimate lesson emerging is that less is more, whether that be in terms of drama or runtime. Clearly embracing this idea is The Golden Bachelor, which has cut episodes down to a short and sweet hour, rather than grasping at straws to fill a two-hour broadcast.

This was the right programming decision to executives, given that The Golden Bachelor would be followed by two hours of Bachelor in Paradise each Thursday night. ABC was testing the waters with the new series, by anchoring it with an old favorite, and if the tides had turned negatively, at least the episode was only eating into an hour of their precious primetime schedule.

“You definitely don’t want people to say, ‘Man, that was just way too long.’ So that was the intention,” Mills said of the shortened episodes. “But obviously, it’s great people want more and hopefully that’ll be a consideration going forward.”

As the Bachelor franchise moves forward, showrunner Freeland feels that returning to basics will be to its benefit.

“I do find that we have now a lot of these people kind of running towards the show because it is a bit of a throwback in terms of how to meet someone, because they are device free and they can really just use the time to focus on building that connection, kind of the way it used to be,” the showrunner told Deadline.

But while the beauty of the reality format is that the story beats quickly become familiar to the audience — everything from limo arrivals to rose ceremonies, hometown dates and fantasy suites — no story should be so rigid that it can’t be adapted to respond to criticism or the changing of the times.

A year ago, one might have said that The Bachelor was a relic of the past. But, while the past few years have been rocky, they have opened the door for ABC and Warner Bros. Unscripted Television to breathe new life into the 20-year-old franchise, and as Sacks says, pave the way for another 20 years.

“The Bachelor has been a huge part of all of our lives. It’s become an institution over the years,” said Ehrlich. “It has ebbed and flowed in popularity, and I hope that we’re at the beginning of a new wave of love for The Bachelor, that it can entertain people that people go to it. They watch it and they see themselves, whoever they are, in the stories that we’re telling.”

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Source: DLine