Bachelor Franchises Biggest Meltdown Exposed!

Taylor Frankie Paul was living every single girl's dream.

On the eve of her Bachelorette season premiere, she was the girl about town, with a glossy cover story and a happy-go-lucky red carpet moment, not to mention a horde of hunky men vying for her affection.

'I wanted to get outside of and the toxicity that I'm in and venture off and really do something for myself,' the cover girl told Us Magazine in the weeks before the premiere.

Paul, known for her notorious swinging scandal in Hulu's hit series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, even went as far as to call herself a 'very soft, gentle person.'

'On Secret Lives, you get my chaotic, reactive, petty side,' she said. 'So there's this persona of me. I think when people meet me, they're usually like, "Oh my gosh, you're a lot nicer than I thought you would be." I'm a very chill, relaxed person.'

But just three days before her season debut, the world got a glimpse of a darker side of Paul when her dreams of finding love fell apart in the most dramatic and public of fashions.

Leaked video showed Paul allegedly assaulting her ex, Dakota Mortenson – father of one of her children and her partner at the time the video was recorded.

It is hardly the first scandal to rock the show (more of that later). But, according to Michael Carroll, a veteran reality TV producer who has worked on both The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, the furor 'completely blows any other scandal that's ever happened on The Bachelor out of the water.'

Speaking to the Daily Mail he said: 'I think it was a huge swing and a miss to cast Taylor, especially someone with as sordid a past as hers seems to be.

'You're casting your lead as someone who's supposed to be the biggest, the best catch in America and she's got three children from two baby daddies and a felony and she was a soft swinger? What choices are we making and what are we trying to promote to the viewing audience?'

Indeed, with the video circulating like wildfire, just three days before the show's premiere, ABC cancelled the upcoming season of The Bachelorette with Disney Entertainment Television issuing the statement: 'In light of the newly released video just surfaced today, we have made the decision to not move forward with the new season of The Bachelorette at this time, and our focus is on supporting the family.'

The eleventh-hour decision is said to have potentially cost Disney tens of millions of dollars and left many asking why the company chose to cast Paul in the first place. After all, executives within the Bachelor franchise were aware that Paul was charged with domestic violence when she was cast.

Though there is no suggestion they had prior knowledge of the leaked footage which was both sobering and horrific.

In it, Paul is seen kicking Mortenson and putting him in a headlock before throwing metal chairs at him, after which Paul's then five-year-old daughter begins crying. Mortenson then alleged that Paul accidentally hit her daughter in the head with one of the chairs.

Carroll believes that ABC casting Paul was a gamble they were willing to take to tap into her immense seven million following across social media, and hopefully convert the robust Mormon Wives audience into Bachelorette fans to revive flagging franchise numbers.

Carroll said: 'I understand why they took this big swing because the ratings and cachet of the show have slid a little bit and there was synergy between Hulu, ABC and Disney all being in the same family.

'But I just don't know that this was the right person to cast, this person with a lot of baggage, especially after knowing that she went through full background, and they probably had seen everything about her.'

The cancellation was the apex of a contentious scandal that's been brewing since Paul, already a notorious reality TV star, was cast as the 22nd Bachelorette.

For a start, Paul is the first Bachelorette lead to have never appeared on a past iteration of the franchise – a fact that perplexed many fans. Bachelor Nation, as fans call themselves, was concerned from the get-go with the network's decision to cast Paul, knowing her criminal past.

Paul, a single mother of three, found infamy in the rampant drama on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where she spilled the secrets of her friend group 'soft swinging' with each other, while working through a messy divorce and a new and tumultuous romance with Mortenson.

That was far from her only trouble, though. In 2023, she was arrested after a dispute with Mortenson and subsequently faced multiple charges, including aggravated assault, domestic violence and child abuse. She pled guilty to one count of third-degree aggravated assault and is still on probation for it; there are currently two ongoing alleged domestic assault investigations between Paul and Mortenson.

It's a far cry from the squeaky-clean beginnings of the Bachelor, a franchise that has spun modern fairy tales out of seasons of reality TV competition for over 20 years.

Riffing on the classic narrative of 'boy meets girl' — or in this case, 'boy meets many girls, then gives the final rose to his favorite one after many tears and group dates' — the titular show and its many spinoffs, including The Bachelorette, found success by staunchly adhering to the belief that if people were there for the right reasons, they would fall in love and live happily ever after. 

When the show debuted in 2002, it was the crème de la crème of dating competition shows, a crown jewel of reality television's early years, selling sincere and starry-eyed romance to their loyal viewers, quickly amassing viewers to the tune of 18 million for the finale of the first season.

In later years, however, competition from other dating shows and changing tastes in the reality TV space have contributed to a steep decline in viewership and noticeable pauses between seasons of their tentpole shows, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.

As Carroll sees it, the Bachelor franchise is at a pivotal crossroads in the wake of Paul's scandal.

Carroll said: 'I think the Bachelor producers seem to be scrambling to figure out how to fit into the new dating reality norm. Scandal sells now and salaciousness seems to be the word of the day when it comes to dating reality shows. Seeing things like Love Is Blind, Too Hot to Handle, Temptation Island, Love Island — they're all about hot people hooking up and that doesn't fit into what the Bachelor has always been, which is a very sincere, romantic, lustrous, and beautiful narrative about dating and love.'

Indeed, a bevy of other heated controversies have also soured feelings towards the Bachelor franchise, especially in the past decade, which has increasingly been critiqued for their vetting of candidates as well as their lack of diversity in casting and in production.

The franchise was slammed for only casting their first Black lead, Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay, in 2017, a whopping 15 years after The Bachelor premiered, and later faced harsh criticism for casting a contestant on her season who had previously made racist and xenophobic comments online. 

The franchise was slammed for only casting their first Black lead, Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay (pictured), in 2017, a whopping 15 years after The Bachelor premiered