We finally know how ABC plans to move forward following Taylor Frankie Paul’s Bachelorette season being pulled from the 2026 TV schedule. However, when The Bachelor and Bachelor in Paradise return in 2027, it apparently won’t be business as usual. Bachelor Nation is allegedly making some changes in hopes of avoiding disasters — not just this most recent one involving the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star, but from other seasons, too — and I’m very interested to see if and how this happens.
Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of The Bachelorette was shelved just days before its scheduled premiere, when video from a 2023 domestic incident was leaked that appeared to show her then-5-year-old daughter being injured when she threw a chair at her then-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen. According to Naughty But Nice gossip columnist Rob Shuter, this was the tipping point that will now see producers rolling out dramatically tougher background checks. Per an insider:
This is not a minor adjustment — it’s a full reset. The franchise has taken too many hits, and production knows they cannot afford another disaster. We’re talking extensive psychological evaluations, deep-dive social media investigations. They’re combing through everything — past relationships, legal records, online behavior, even the people contestants keep close.
Of course, producers can’t blame holes in their current background check system for what happened with Taylor Frankie Paul. Her 2023 arrest from the incident in the viral video was part of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Season 1 premiere, and Paul has spoken about it at length on various podcasts. Should we assume this “reset” will also include not casting leads with criminal backgrounds?
Article continues belowThe application process to get on a Bachelor show is said to already be pretty extensive, but the insider says producers are going to be far more aggressive with social media investigations, also looking into past relationships, legal records and online behavior after seeing so many red flags slip through on recent seasons. The source said:
They’ve been burned, repeatedly. People with messy, troubling, or flat-out disqualifying histories made it onto the show — and viewers uncovered it before production did. … Reddit was vetting contestants better than casting. That was embarrassing, and everyone inside the franchise knew it.
I follow Bachelor Nation news pretty extensively, and I can vouch for fans being quick to discover when contestants had restraining orders taken out against them by exes before appearing on a Bachelor show — including multiple contestants on the most recent seasons of The Bachelorette and The Golden Bachelorette, starring Jenn Tran and Joan Vassos, respectively.
There have also been abuse allegations and contestants with troubling social media histories. So why were fans able to find this but not The Bachelorette’s producers? However it happened, it seems ABC is now taking action after reportedly losing tens of millions of dollars by not airing Taylor Frankie Paul’s already-filmed season, the source said:
That was the wake-up call. It cost millions, created massive embarrassment, and forced them to admit the system was broken.
I’m honestly not sure if The Bachelor’s producers didn’t know about some of these contestants’ histories or — like in Taylor Frankie Paul’s case — they knew but decided to cast them anyway.
Either way, we in Bachelor Nation have heard promises from the franchise before — notably when the EPs admitted to “racism” within the franchise and pledged to do better at protecting their leads just three months before Jenn Tran’s disastrous Bachelorette finale aired. The insider acknowledged that fans will be looking for actions and not just words:
They can promise cleaner casting. But drama is still the engine of this franchise. The real question is whether they’re actually ready to stop casting chaos.
The Bachelor franchise obviously revolves around drama, but when it comes to putting potentially dangerous contestants into the mix, that is definitely not what fans of the show are looking for. Hopefully when the dating series returns next year, we’ll start to see evidence of these alleged changes.
