Can the Bachelor Franchise Heal Its Broken Heart?

So, how can The Bachelor turn it all around? Kultgen suggests outsourcing. “They should take any single guy from Love Island season seven—he’s the next Bachelor. They have done the work for you, made these people superstars in the reality dating TV format. That’s how they should be thinking.”

“I have no evidence of this, but I think they’re doing the opposite,” he adds. “I think they’re saying, ‘Fuck Love Island. We have our own thing going here.’”

Former Bachelorette contestant and returning Paradise bartender Wells Adams doesn’t put it in those exact terms. But clearly, Bachelor imitators like Love Island USA touch a nerve. “All the other shows ripped off our show, so they’re all imposters and we are the real deal, and we’ve been doing it for a lot longer,” he tells me at a launch event for the series in lower Manhattan. Adams pauses. “But that’s not to say that we can’t learn things from other shows, which I think that we have.”

And not a moment too soon. Adams was shocked when a recent Paradise contestant recognized him not from his time in the Bachelor-verse, but from Adams’s stint on The Traitors. “So that concerned me a bit, that he hadn’t seen the show that he was currently on.”

A revamp is particularly overdue for Bachelor in Paradise, which had been on hiatus since season nine ended with series-low ratings in 2023. “If I’m being honest, the show needed a new skin,” Adams tells Vanity Fair. He credits up-to-date showrunner Scott Teti, best known for executive producing Bravo’s fun-in-the-sun series Summer House, with “putting a new spin on classic IP.”

Adams and Teti headline this season alongside Hannah Brown, the very popular Bachelorette who has also won both Dancing With the Stars and Special Forces. Later in the season, cast members from The Golden Bachelor and Golden Bachelorette will hit the sand for the first time. “I know there are going to be [members of] hardcore Bachelor Nation that are used to what they’ve always seen,” Palmer says, “but I’m really excited about how the show looks and feels moving forward. There were a lot of unknowns. We were sort of—I don’t want to say flying by the seat of our pants, but we didn’t necessarily always know what to expect.”

Network TV can’t compete with the Hunger Games–esque exploits of Love Island, a show that films in real time and is influenced by live audience votes. Nor can it be as risqué: Bachelor in Paradise “can’t show those close-ups of butts like Love Island does. They have to put a black box over it,” says Pace. “Sad.”