The Bachelor and Bachelorette, ABC’s once crown jewel of American entertainment, have taken a rather sharp nosedive in recent years. With declining ratings, controversial casting and diversity problems garnering media attention over the last few years, this has been a persistent issue for producers. However, the finale of Jenn Tran’s season might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to really calling out the deep-rooted flaws with the show.
Jenn Tran, a 26-year-old Physician Assistant student from New Jersey, was announced as the Bachelorette in March following Joey Graziadei’s season of the Bachelor, in which Jenn was sent home right before hometowns. The choice to make Jenn the Bachelorette sparked an unprecedented amount of controversy, since it seemed like all signs pointed towards fan favorites Maria Georgas or Daisy Kent to get the title role. This backlash started Jenn’s season already off on the wrong foot, since she wasn’t exactly given the “Bachelorette” edit.
However, the true issue with Jenn’s season doesn’t come until the final episode. Over the course of the entire season, Jenn had to spend a considerable amount of time wrestling with insecurities at the fact that there was a good chance a lot of the men there didn’t want or expect her as the Bachelorette. However, in the final episode, she got engaged to her fiancé, Devin Strader, and they lived happily ever after—for about a month or two, before Devin broke up with Jenn over the course of a 15-minute phone call.
You may be thinking, “That’s just a bad guy casting let slip through the cracks. That has nothing to do with the actual production of the show”, until you realize that on the finale episode, the show’s producers made Jenn, who had her heart broken just weeks prior, rewatch her engagement to Devin. All while Devin was sitting right beside her. The entire engagement, if you were wondering.
Watching the clips of Jenn uncontrollably crying while being forced to watch one of the most hopeful moments of her life right after it was flipped upside down was hands-down one of the most gut-wrenching moments of live television I have ever seen. It left me and millions of other Americans wondering, “Why the hell would they do that to her?”.
The Bachelor Franchise received an extraordinary amount of backlash for how they handled Jenn’s season. They knew that many men on the show were not genuinely interested in Jenn for one reason or another, or just simply wanted to gain followers, yet took no further action to address this.
As we live in an increasingly digitized world and one that is run by social media, it has forced us to change a lot of the ways we have gone about dating or exploring our romantic lives. However, the producers of The Bachelor know that their formula for the show is tried and true and works in bringing in viewers, despite failing ratings over the years. To keep whoever is left watching the show, they must tweak some measures of the formula (for example, having two Bachelorettes or creating the “Golden” series) or put emphasis on the ridiculous “dramatics” of a season that we “will never believe” until we watch.
As a fan of the show, I had hope when I watched how they let Daisy empower herself at the finale of Joey’s season and was hoping for that trend to continue. Unfortunately, Jenn’s season was a huge step backward. The show needs to listen to the fans call for increased diversity, more authentic contestants and, for lack of a better term, the humane treatment of the participants. Without heeding to the calls of the viewers, the trend of the declining viewership will continue, and you won’t have to “see to believe” that.