Warning: Spoilers for Peter Weber's 2020 finale of The Bachelor with Madison Prewett, Hannah Ann Sluss and Barbara Weber are still raging and can be found below!
I'm not over Peter Weber's After the Final Rose finale of The Bachelor, you guys. Nope, not quite yet. And, with good reason, seeing as how we're still getting information about how things went down for Madison Prewett's awkward family-time visit Australia, Peter's poorly thought out proposal to Hannah Ann Sluss and everything that has happened afterward. This, of course, includes how Peter's mom, Barbara Weber, acted on the live finale when she found out that he and Madi were planning for another shot at romance.
Even fans who agreed with the basic idea that Madi and Peter were too different to try romance again, were shocked to watch Barbara go on and on about how the two of them would fail, and detail all the reasons why, and why no one, out of all Peter's friends and family apparently, thought the relationship would work. Which, we now know, it didn't...but STILL. Damn, Barbara; you're talking to your son like this on live television!
As you might imagine, Chris Harrison, who was right there in the midst of all the drama, was not cool with how The Bachelor finale turned out, either. Here's what he told Entertainment Weekly:
It was unfortunate. It really was, in all seriousness. I hated to watch it, I hated to be there. It was kind of sad, I was disappointed by the whole thing. And I tried to fix it, I just couldn't fix it. I kept waiting for [Barbara] to go, 'Okay, but you know what, I'm going to give this a shot,' or 'Bygones, and we're just going to make the best of this,' but it just kept getting worse and worse. My initial instinct and gut was more like I was sick to my stomach, watching Peter go through this...I guess my point is this: I'm a dad too. I understand that passion of wanting the best for your kids and loving them and not wanting them to make mistakes, but even when you see your kids running toward that proverbial cliff, you've got to let them go. That's life.
I'm sure Chris Harrison wasn't the only one who was sick to his stomach watching Barbara decline any familial support for Peter and Madison's romance. But, because he was present at the live taping and privy to what went on in Australia, Harrison has given us some background information on what happened prior to Madi's time with Peter's family, as well as something that he noticed during the finale.
First off, let's go back to what Barb said about Madison when the family had just flown half way around the world to talk to Peter's final two women. She said (several times) that Madison made them wait three hours before Peter was finally able to convince her to come and meet his parents and brother again (remember, she met them the first time during the first one-on-one date she and Peter had many weeks before). According to Chris Harrison, it wasn't fair for Barb to put the blame for all of that wait time on Madi. He told ET:
I don't know the exact timing, but they did wait and they waited a long time. But, this is what was interesting, and, again, putting it on Madison, not fair. It was a conversation. It wasn't makeup, it wasn't that she slept in, it wasn't that she needed to eat. [Peter and Madison] were having a very serious conversation between each other as to if this is going to work. And, if it's not, I don't want to go meet your family; I don't want to bring another family into this and take this step, unless we're serious about this...It was just as much on Peter as it was Madison. Madison wasn't throwing a diva fit.
Wow. OK, Barb really did make it sound like it was all on Madison for their wait once they got to Australia when she was sitting there dressed like a funeral was about to go down on the live finale, didn't she? Well, it turns out that their wait was just about Madi and Peter trying to hash out relationship details, which, as Chris Harrison pointed out, really did need to be discussed. (I mean, it didn't help. But at least they tried?)
The other added bit of info takes us back to what happened live during the finale. After we watched video of Peter and Hannah Ann breaking up at that mystery location that Bachelor Nation managed to track down a few weeks ago, Hannah Ann came out to confront Peter about his broken promises. Now, I didn't really think that Perter should have ended up with Hannah Ann, either, especially not with the circumstances surrounding that proposal, but no one can argue that she didn't stand up for herself during the breakup and call Peter out on some very important points when she sat down for the finale.
Pretty much everyone watching saw how much support Barb had for Hannah Ann as she was telling Peter off (with a lot of admirable sophistication), but what Chris Harrison saw that most of us probably missed is that all of those applause for Hannah Ann started with Barb. That's right folks, Barb was so against her son leaving Hannah Ann behind and pursuing Madison again that she basically turned against her kid on live TV.
This whole season of The Bachelor? Well, it has me sorta exhausted. I can't wait to move on to whatever messy drama The Bachelor: Listen To Your Heart and Clare Crawley's season of The Bachelorette have in store for us, though. I need a reality TV romance palate cleanser so I can forget about Peter Weber, Barb and the whole lot of 'em.
The Bachelor: Listen To Your Heart begins April 13 on ABC, while The Bachelorette will premiere on May 18. Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for the latest in Bachelor Nation news and spoilers!
