Although the entertainment industry has been more or less brought to a standstill due to the coronavirus pandemic, some TV shows will still be able to finish airing their current seasons. The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart actually completed filming before it even premiered, and the six-episode series should be able to air from start to finish. Now, however, ABC could add some episodes to the first season, but not with longtime Bachelor host Chris Harrison gathering all the musical singles back to the mansion for more action that definitely violates social distancing. Harrison explained the plan:
We are not shooting anymore; the show is done, it is in the can. Now we are going back and looking with a fine-tooth comb where there are other moments that we could pull out. Honestly, nothing is off the table... That happens quite a bit, so it's not crazy to look deeper into the show and think, 'Hey, could episode 6 have three hours?' So we are trying to be creative and trying to leave all the cards on the table and all options open to see what we can do.
Speaking with ET, Chris Harrison was clear that nobody at the show or ABC is planning on restarting shooting and bringing the cast and crew back together in person. The team will instead check the existing footage for "moments" that could flesh out the episodes and add some extra hours. The coronavirus pandemic has halted Clare Crawley's season of The Bachelorette, the next season of Bachelor in Paradise has stalled, and ABC (unsurprisingly) already had to cancel The Bachelor: Summer Games.
The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart might be the only Bachelor series with new content for the foreseeable future; ABC working to stretch existing footage into more episodes can only be good news for Bachelor Nation fans. Of course, Chris Harrison's comments prove that ABC and the Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart team were already working to lengthen the season before Listen to Your Heart premiered on April 13.
Chris Harrison addressed the possibility of a reunion show bringing the Listen to Your Heart contestants back together to add to the episode count. He noted that there's "a fine line" between delivering "good content" and just "throwing something on TV" for the sake of having something on TV, then said this:
We're going to, first of all, wait and see. Hopefully, everybody loves this show and they want more of it. If there is this appetite and we think that there's enough story there where there's relationships or whatever it is where it garners a special, then, yeah, [we'll do a reunion]. Unless we can get people safely into a studio -- it would definitely be done without an audience -- but I think we could Zoom, or maybe bring somebody socially safe away from me, you know, do it eight feet apart. But yeah, I could see that happening.
If a reunion special happens, it wouldn't be with all the contestants together in close quarters or with an audience in the studio to "Ooooh" and "Aaaah" at the drama. That said, seasons of The Bachelor and Bachelorette traditionally end with an "After the Final Rose" episode, so a reunion special would be something Bachelor Nation fans are familiar with, even if not usually via Zoom.
Could The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart follow Saturday Night Live and produce an episode with everybody contributing from home? The show must (safely) go on, after all, and TV viewers might soon be hungry for as much new content as possible. For now, new episodes of Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart air Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
