When the Fantasy of<em> The Bachelor</em> Finally Met Reality

Within days, Harrison issued an apology for “excusing historical racism” and said he’d be stepping aside. Though The Bachelor continued to air as though nothing had happened, the reputational damage had been done: The season, the lowest-averaging one yet, ended with a finale that drew a mere 5.75 million total viewers—a huge drop from last season’s finale and far from the show’s peak of nearly 26 million viewers for an episode.

Harrison stepping down is unprecedented. He’s been the face of the show, and of the larger franchise it spawned, since the beginning, introducing viewers to the cast and often acting as the Bachelor or Bachelorette’s onscreen confidante. But the host’s statements to Lindsay are only the most visible expression of the show’s deeper problems, which have been years in the making. In 2017, my colleague Megan Garber wrote of spin-off The Bachelorette, “Watching it has become harder and harder to enjoy—and, like that other blood sport, harder and harder to defend.” Today, The Bachelor no longer seems interested in even pretending that it’s about love and is alienating many of its most loyal fans. Ardent viewers that I spoke with are frustrated by how recent seasons have exploited contestants to new extremes and cynically mined racial conflicts for drama. “It’s very polarizing,” Alecka Edwards, a longtime fan and co-host of the podcast The Blachelorettes, told me over Zoom of this moment in Bachelor history. “I don’t think I’ve seen this before.”

Read: ‘The Bachelorette’ reveals itself for what it is

Edwards and other members of “Bachelor Nation,” as the fandom is known, have usually been among the show’s most vocal defenders. They understand that what they’re watching isn’t completely authentic, and they often comb through episodes for insights into human behavior. Some argue that the show is “feminist,” or that it’s TV’s “smartest” sociological experiment. On their podcast, Game of Roses, Chad Kultgen and Lizzy Pace analyze Bachelor shows as if they were a sport. Kultgen, who has watched every season of the series and its spin-offs, told me he admires how the franchise sells its premise that genuine romance can be engineered. “For me, the fascination is it’s an open lie that most of the audience believes,” he said.

That putative boundary between the onscreen love story and the behind-the-scenes drama has traditionally allowed the franchise to avoid talking about its connection to the real world. But in recent years, The Bachelor started blurring that boundary in a bid to seem more progressive. In 2017, Lindsay was cast as the first Black Bachelorette. Last year, The Bachelorette devoted airtime to a conversation about race, a rare topic for a lead and suitor to discuss on camera. After last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, the show announced that James would be the first Black Bachelor, perhaps expecting fans to celebrate the historic move. And they did—until the controversy over Kirkconnell and Harrison suggested the show hadn’t changed as much as it had made cosmetic fixes to remain relevant.  

This year, the contradiction—of a series asking fans to applaud it for meeting the outside world’s changing standards on a casting level and then failing to meet those standards behind the scenes—was too obvious to ignore. “A few years ago, the mainstream media would have moved on [after Harrison’s apology] and this would be quickly forgotten,” Rachel Dubrofsky, an associate professor and reality-TV scholar at the University of South Florida, told me over email. Pushback from former contestants also made moving on harder. The Bachelorette finalist Ivan Hall and others have said they wouldn’t feel comfortable participating in spin-offs if Harrison returns. Lindsay announced she’s leaving the franchise after her contract to co-host a series-affiliated podcast ends. “What has shifted right now, in this particular moment with the Harrison situation, is with the culture in which the series is airing,” Dubrofsky said.