The Bachelor franchise has struggled with its casting in the last few seasons, but its most recent blunders have proven that it needs an entirely new casting team, as its current one doesn’t care about the leads. Although The Bachelor has been running since 2002, the most recent seasons of the series have seen an uptick in the leads of the shows coming out of their seasons unhappy or blindsided. With The Bachelorette season 21 having surrounded Jenn Tran with a cast of men who ranged from slightly uninterested to literal criminal, the franchise is having problems throughout its shows.
While the long-running franchise has produced many successful couples, there have been some major red flags in the contestants of the last few seasons that are making Bachelor Nation beg the question: are these contestants being background checked? Though The Bachelor producers have shared that they background check their contestants, it’s clear that either the checks aren’t thorough, or there are incidents they’re not concerned about. With issues coming out of The Bachelorette season 21 winner Devin Strader and The Golden Bachelorette season 1 contestant Gil Ramirez in just the last few weeks, producers have a lot to answer for.
Casting Has Been Abysmal For Recent Bachelor Franchise Shows
Cast Members Have Had Violent Pasts
While The Bachelor franchise has had a history of questionable casting choices, the issues that have come up in recent seasons have more to do with the safety of the leads than ever before. During The Bachelorette season 21, Jenn’s font-runner Devin seemed to be more of a villain than a hero, but his penchant for starting drama didn’t seem to be a major red flag until after the season ended. When Jenn and Devin appeared on The Bachelorette: After The Final Rose and explained they’d split up, Devin’s behavior toward Jenn was lackluster, giving Bachelor Nation pause.
When viewers and spoiler accounts dug around to check on his past, Devin’s criminal history was shocking. With a restraining order against him from an ex who he was physically and mentally harmful toward, Devin was a dangerous person in the past and shouldn’t have been cast on The Bachelorette because of it. With The Golden Bachelorette getting started, viewers checked into the cast members on the show as well and found that another contestant, Gil, had an even more recent restraining order against him, leading ABC to share they’d be editing him out of future episodes.
Poor Casting Proves The Franchise Doesn’t Care About Leads
The Bachelor Franchise Needs To Find A New Way To Vet Their Cast Members
The Casting Team Needs To Be Replaced
At this point, The Bachelor franchise needs to make some major changes to continue to have the trust of its audience. With Devin and Gil being examples of just a few of the more harmful casting choices they’ve made in recent years, they’re only the tip of the iceberg. There needs to be a change in how Bachelor producers choose the people who join in on the journeys of a lifetime for their leads, and it needs to happen now. There needs to be better ways to vet cast members who join The Bachelor and its spin-offs in the future.
