Members of Bachelor Nation appear ready to give a rose to the newest addition to the franchise.
Fans of the long-running reality dating franchise expressed shock — and enthusiasm — after ABC announced Wednesday that Taylor Frankie Paul, a reality TV star from “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” would be the next lead of “The Bachelorette.”
The news came seven months after the network put the show, a spinoff of “The Bachelor,” on pause. Many viewers considered the show’s most recent, 21st season a disaster after Jenn Tran, the franchise’s first Asian American lead, experienced a devastating end to her love story.
The network’s decision to cast Paul is likely ABC’s attempt to bring more eyes to a show that has been sagging in the ratings, losing viewers and “slowly retreating into cultural obscurity,” said writer Emma Gray, who co-hosts the “Love To See It” podcast, which discusses reality TV shows.
While “The Bachelor” has, in the past, plucked men from partial fame to bring them into the dating show mix, picking Paul is “a really, really big swing” for the network, Gray said. Typically, leads are chosen from an existing pool of previous candidates. But Paul, who has a whopping 1.7 million followers on Instagram, comes from a different world entirely.
The 31-year-old rose to fame with the creation of #MomTok while she was married to her first husband, Tate Paul, with whom she has two children. In May 2022, she went viral after sharing in a livestream that she and Tate were “soft-swinging” in the Mormon community, a revelation that led to their divorce.
She quickly started dating Dakota Mortensen after that, a relationship that became one of the storylines of the Hulu reality show. She also had a child with Mortensen out of wedlock. In February 2023, she was arrested and charged with aggravated assault after a drunken fight with Mortensen. Paul entered a plea deal in lieu of serving time in jail.
Gray predicted that people who used to be locked into “The Bachelorette” but haven’t watched in years might tune back in to this season because of the chaos Paul could bring.
Already, many appeared enthusiastic about the casting choice, saying it could be what makes the franchise re-enter the cultural zeitgeist.
One fan on X said that “abc and hulu ate that casting up.” Another added that the news “did make the tectonic plates below me shift.” Yet another excited fan called the casting decision “quite possibly one of the smartest moves in the reality television space that I’ve seen in years!”
Bravo by Betches, a Bravo fan account run by Betches Media, said they “have to watch the new season” because of Paul’s casting.
Some fans, however, reacted negatively to the news, with one X user predicting this could be the “final nail in the coffin for the bachelorette franchise.” Several people also expressed concern that ABC is elevating a public figure with a history of domestic disputes.
In an interview with NBC News last year, Paul addressed her arrest, saying she’s now in a better place.
“At that time, I was going 90 miles per hour. I wasn’t even thinking straight,” Paul said, ahead of the “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” season one debut. “I was in a depression as well, so I don’t even know if I was handling it. I think I was just surviving at the time, and maybe made choices that I’m not proud of today.”
Gray said she hopes that ABC does not shy away from being honest about Paul’s history, and instead faces her aggravated assault charge against her ex-boyfriend head-on.
“The franchise, in general, plays it safe,” she said. “There is also a good amount of respectability politics that plays into the way that we usually see, especially a Bachelorette.”
But Paul is in a unique position as someone who has already been in the spotlight.
“She is not new to a massive onslaught of commentary, good, bad or otherwise, from the public,” Gray said. “She is not new with having to grapple out loud and take responsibility for her faults, her flaws, her mistakes, her darkest moments.”
Paul is not the typical “Bachelorette” candidate.
She is “very messy … very publicly, and so she does play against, in some ways, the type of people they have cast in these roles,” Gray said.
But that’s what helps make her the right pick for the current climate.
She comes from a deeply conservative background and is “in many ways emblematic of this conservative cultural moment” that has exploded in recent months, Gray said. But she’s also a single mother who had one of her kids out of wedlock and has pushed away conservative conventions.
“She is someone who has spoken quite openly about the pressure within the Mormon community to not speak about sex, to get married early, and the ways in which that culture has negatively impacted her,” Gray said. “And at the same time, she is still a member of the Mormon church.”
Her politics also help make her a relevant choice, as she is someone who straddles a progressive and conservative audience.
“The Bachelorette” has always been a show about marriage, a “fundamentally conservative bend,” Gray said, that also appeals to a wide progressive audience.
All this, Gray said, is what ABC is betting on to help revive what some have described as a dying franchise.
“One thing that they knew to be true is that the choice will not be boring, and that they are going to have a lot of eyeballs on this show as a result come January.”
