ABC’s television show “The Bachelorette” is a touchstone of sorts for Millennials. As a Millennial myself, I was dragged into watching a season of it during college.
In the show, a single woman dates multiple men over several weeks, gradually narrowing her options to one “true love” suitor. “The Bachelorette” and its male version, “The Bachelor,” have been on the air since the early 2000s. They were considered the classiest show of their type and enjoyed a huge fan base.
However, starting in the 2010s, ratings began to drop, and by the 2020s, they nosedived.
Why? Well, some of you may recall that in Season 25 of “The Bachelor” in 2021, there was a cancellation involving Rachael Kirkconnell. Kirkconnell was hounded by internet trolls regarding a photo from her college days (years before her time on the show) of her wearing a Southern belle costume at an antebellum-themed party. The trolls were also mad at Kirkconnell for liking photos of her friends dressed in clothes deemed cultural appropriation.
Beloved show host Chris Harrison defended Rachael against the wokescolds. He was fired, and bachelor Matt James broke up with Kirkconnell. It was peak cancel culture, and the mob, armed with “virtue” pitchforks, got their scalp.
Since then, ABC has decided to post the contestants’ names in advance so that internet sleuths can suss out the undesirables. That way, ABC doesn’t have to, and it can make adjustments accordingly.
The whole situation was wretched and cowardly. Half the fans were mad because a girl was tarred and feathered for a picture that was misconstrued as “racist.” The other half were mad because ABC didn’t catch it before choosing Kirkconnell for the show, and James was the first black bachelor to premiere.
The franchise has been in its death throes for a decade now, and other shows like “Love Island” have garnered significant popularity. Apparently, ABC thought that desperate times called for desperate measures because nothing else can adequately explain the casting of Taylor Frankie Paul in Season 22 of “The Bachelorette.”
Paul was one of the original MomTok influencers on TikTok. MomTok is a sub-genre in which moms dispense advice and flaunt the lifestyles they have cultivated. As we have seen from other influencer moms, when one commoditizes her family and children, it brings out one’s absolute worst. Taylor Frankie Paul is no different.
Paul and her gang of Utah-based MomTokkers got their own TV show called “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” In the show, viewers learn entirely too much about these women and their lives. Paul has two children from her first husband, Tate Paul, and has a third child whom she shares with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Dakota Mortensen.
Her marriage and two other marriages were broken up due to “soft swinging” — a scandal that has been public knowledge since 2022. Furthermore, Paul and her boyfriend have had a volatile relationship. Paul has been credibly accused of domestic abuse, which has been known since 2023.
And yet showrunners for “The Bachelorette” decided to use Paul as the lead anyway. All of her baggage was out in the open before filming even started. How is this more defensible than a young girl wearing a Southern belle outfit to a sorority party?
On March 19, ABC finally decided to shelve Season 22 of “The Bachelorette.” Why? Well, Paul’s alleged domestic abuse was caught on video and released to the public. In the video, Paul is physically attacking Mortensen, and at one point, she throws a couple of chairs at him. All of this was done in front of at least one of Paul’s children, and it looks like one of them might have been struck by the chair from the ricochet.
Sponsors responded by pulling financial support.
“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,” Disney, which owns ABC, explained in a message.
As for Paul, her PR team decided to spin this nightmare by asserting that it was the “latest installment of [Mortensen’s] never-ending, desperate, attention-seeking, destructive campaign to harm Taylor without any regard for the consequences for their child.”
Conservative political pundit Ben Shapiro pointed out that Paul is exactly the type of woman being talked about by the so-called manosphere. These women are self-centered, toxic, and an aberration. Yet to the manosphere — which is made up of twisted individuals like Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and others who clearly just hate women — they are the exception that proves the rule, feeding fuel to their scam and driving young men into the arms of truly bad and disordered social media influencers.
ABC’s disaster with Taylor Frankie Paul was completely avoidable. Her scandals were public knowledge years ago, though frankly, this couldn’t have happened to a more deserving franchise. ABC’s hypocrisy and fight to stay relevant proved to be its ultimate downfall.
