Three years ago, Colton Underwood hopped a fence and abandoned The Bachelor. His entire season had been building up to that moment, which was relentlessly teased and plastered over every promo. When it finally happened, the Bachelor’s genuine emotional reaction—he’d just been dumped by Cassie Randolph, one of his front-runners—turned the scene from a meme to an unexpected moment of reality-TV subversion. For just a moment, Colton had revealed that he was fed up with being the main character on The Bachelor.
He returned to the cameras eventually, of course, and won back Cassie’s heart by eliminating her two competitors an episode early. The circle of life (which, as we all know, runs from Bachelor to Bachelorette to Bachelor in Paradise back to Bachelor) continued.
The fence jump has not been repeated. But in a much quieter way this season, it’s starting to feel once more like the men of The Bachelor don’t really want to be The Bachelor anymore. And this time, it’s not that they’re fed up—they just seem bored.
Current Bachelor Matt James was meant to be a change of pace, the first leading man not to be plucked from a previous season or from The Bachelorette. (For a reality-TV show about beautiful people falling in love, there’s a surprising amount of lore involved in The Bachelor.) On one level, it’s a substantial course correction from last season’s Peter Weber, whose run was dominated by leftover Bachelorette drama. And in at least one other area, Matt has changed the show for the better: He’s the first Black Bachelor, and his cast is admirably diverse.
But despite the franchise’s slowly shifting representation priorities, Matt’s season has felt strikingly like more of the same. As it draws to a close, his search for romance has melted into the background of calculated Bachelor Mansion feuding, leaving the women he’s dating to pick up the slack.
It’s difficult to remember a single memorable one-on-one date this season, but there’s been plenty of drama to make up for that. There’s the time a group of contestants bullied a fellow cast member off the show after she interrupted a group date, only to discover later that she’d left to spend time with her ill father. Or the time those same women accused a newcomer of being a sex worker, with only anonymous Instagram DMs as evidence and no televised apology. Or there’s everything about Victoria Larson, who, by the end of her run on the show, had become such a whirling dervish of bad intentions that it’s difficult to choose a representative incident. Maybe the time she called a fellow contestant a ho, then insisted it was “taken out of context”?
It’s never a surprise when The Bachelor devolves into surreal arguments and unreasonable grudges: Joining the show means leaving family, friends, phones, and even music behind, so winding up a little frantic by the final rose comes with the territory. And as it did in so many contexts, 2020 added a new wrinkle to the proceedings: cast members were forced to quarantine on their own for 14 days before filming began. Where previous seasons showcased a slow-motion descent into chaos, this year the show felt unhinged from the get-go.
The most recent season of The Bachelorette was also upended by COVID-19 restrictions, but it had a secret weapon that’s now become very obvious: pinch-hitter Tayshia Adams, who jumped in to replace the season’s initial Bachelorette, Clare Crawley. (Clare left the show early to be with one of her front-runners; the couple has now, quite shockingly, split up.)
The Bachelor cast’s quarantine brains have manifested in a thirst for pure anarchy—but The Bachelorette’s ranks had a great sense of entitlement, with two contestants defying Tayshia’s judgement and returning even after being denied a rose. That attitude didn’t win them any favors: Tayshia handled the drama with a steady, mature hand that felt altogether out of place among the smarmy fraternity brothers who often populate The Bachelorette. When two of the men started a testosterone-fueled feud, she caught on almost immediately and sat them down to settle it. Bachelor Matt, by contrast, has been somewhat less attentive and direct. He didn’t understand the toxic atmosphere pervading his season until cast member Katie Thurston informed him about it.
It’s not unusual for the Bachelor himself to be outshined on The Bachelor; breakout contestants often go on to be larger players in the franchise as a whole. As it wraps up its 25th season, that franchise has become increasingly insular, with former contestants and friends of former contestants frequently cropping up to foment cliff-hanger endings. (Heather Martin, who competed for Colton’s heart, has already been advertised as appearing later this season.) And while he hasn’t appeared on another iteration of the show, even Matt is still a member of what could charitably be called the Bachelor Extended Universe—before his star turn, he was the close friend and roommate of former Bachelorette contestant Tyler Cameron.
That familiar quality is comforting in the same way any long-running series is comforting, but it doesn’t always make for particularly good television. The Bachelor and its various offshoots are at their best when they strike a balance between outrageous behavior and what feels like a halfway realistic, human partnership. Lately, that balance has tilted too far towards the former. Matt seems like a fun guy; his penchant for making hideous, borderline offensive charcuterie boards is kind of incredible. But the show’s producers have fashioned him into a Bachelor-shaped vacuum, fulfilling all of the franchise’s requirements without giving the role any of the humanity that keeps it watchable.
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