Reality star Taylor Frankie Paul was always the wrong choice on ABC’s “The Bachelorette.” Now, the character of “Mormon’s Wife” may be its downfall.
ABC cancels Taylor Frankie Paul’s ‘Bachelorette’ season
Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of The Bachelorette has been canceled following the revelation of a “domestic assault investigation” by Utah State Police.
This season of “The Bachelorette” will go down in history, but it wasn’t quite what ABC intended.
ABC has canceled Season 22 of The Bachelorette after TMZ exposed shocking and violent videos of upcoming Bachelorette star Taylor Frankie Paul, her ex-partner Dakota Mortensen, and one of her children.
Paul, 31, who rose to fame as the star of Hulu’s reality show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” (both Hulu and ABC are owned by Disney), was supposed to inject some drama, spice and relevance into the aging “Bachelor” franchise, at least from the network and producer Warner Bros.’s perspective. Paul, the standout personality on “The Mormon Wife,” has been a source of drama, suspense, and suspense. A viral moment from that series. Now, her actions on and off screen are causing turmoil in two of Disney’s biggest reality series. In addition to The Bachelorette being canceled, filming on Season 5 of Mormon Wives was paused amid Paul’s legal tangles.
How did we get here? “The Bachelorette” is part of ABC’s 24-year-old “Bachelor” series, which became a TV show that made the network rich and led to real-life marriages and babies. Why was it the setting for one of the most unseemly controversies in the already seedy history of reality TV? Why did it make sense to risk the integrity of a TV show about a woman who had already been arrested while filming another show to grab ratings and relevance? Where did ABC go wrong?
Taylor Frankie Paul was always wrong on ‘The Bachelorette’
“The Bachelor” enjoys love and romance. “Mormon Wives” is in bad taste and vulgar. Taylor Frankie Paul shouldn’t have messed with roses.
Because that’s the biggest problem here, and the original sin of ABC’s choice to bet big on Paul — even viewers already knew about Paul’s history of violence and instability. The leaked video that caused all of this is of an incident between Paul and Mortensen in 2023 that was featured in the 2024 series premiere of “Mormon Wives.”
The Utah-based series tells the story of a group of women who find success on TikTok and call themselves “MomTok.” Paul is a central character in the first episode, which features body camera footage from his arrest in 2023 for assault, mischief, and domestic violence in the presence of a child. However, the show downplays the seriousness of the incident and, most importantly, the fact that a child was present and injured during the scuffle. All will be revealed once a substantive investigation into the arrest and subsequent trial is conducted.
It wasn’t until the horror of this video became public knowledge that ABC, Warner Bros., and Disney were held accountable for the women they slept with. In the video, Mortensen films Paul punching and kicking him. She threw furniture at him. I hear screams and screams. I hear a child crying. The video surfaced amid an ongoing domestic assault investigation into Paul and Mortensen, with both suspects reportedly admitting to the charges, including recent charges related to an incident in February of this year.
A spokesperson for Disney Entertainment Television told USA TODAY, “In light of the new video that was just released today, we have made the decision not to move forward with a new season of ‘The Bachelorette’ at this time. Our focus is on supporting our family.”
According to the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, canceling the season was the right decision, and clearly an expensive one, potentially costing ABC between $50 million and $70 million. But it should never have been filmed. Even before the allegations of violence garnered so much public attention, it was clear that Paul’s character was the opposite of The Bachelorette’s fairy-tale romantic themes.
The early trailer for Paul’s season is probably all the public will ever see: an exercise in whiplash. In the first few clips, she says all the right things about true love, kisses various contestants in romantic locations, and flutters her eyelashes at the camera. But then her more belligerent personality emerges. She seems to dismiss contestants at random intervals in the heat of the moment, belittle the very idea of a rose, and make suitors question why they would want to pursue a relationship with her.
There has always been drama on “The Bachelor,” but that came from the cast of women or men seeking to marry the stars. The titular bachelor or celibate is meant to be a paragon of virtue and is worthy of the twenty people vying for his heart. Paul could never become such a person, no matter how famous she was already.
The “Bachelor” series was already in decline. This might be the end.
From a purely mercenary perspective, it’s understandable how Paul ended up flying from Utah to Los Angeles to participate in “The Bachelorette.”
“Mormon Wives” became a welcome reality hit for Disney. Disney is a rival to Bravo series such as “Real Housewives,” “Vanderpump Rules,” and “Below Deck,” whose similarly messy, angry, and unique casts generate high drama and ratings. The company is already leveraging other stars in the series, hiring Whitney Leavitt and Jen Affleck for “Dancing with the Stars.”
And while Bachelor Nation still has a devoted following, ABC’s original reality dating series has long languished in ratings and zeitgeist. Despite the soaring popularity of “The Golden Bachelor” and “The Golden Bachelorette,” which cast singles over the age of 60, ratings for the series and its spinoffs have steadily declined, dropping nearly 75% over the past decade.
With extensive marketing, including Paul’s appearances on the Oscars red carpet and on Good Morning America, and much talk about her upcoming appearance on The Bachelorette in Season 4 of Mormon Housewives, Disney executives were hoping that Paul’s lightning rod would once again boost ratings.
But at least according to one former Bachelorette, Paul likely killed the series rather than resurrecting it. On the Bachelor Party podcast, former star Rachel Lindsay said what many viewers, insiders, and critics are thinking: “I think it’s over,” Lindsay said. “At this point, the names ‘The Bachelorette,’ ‘The Bachelor,’ are tarnished. How do we move beyond that? We can’t do that.”
she’s right. Fans are likely to feel betrayed by this bait-and-switch, with the show’s star, who was supposed to represent traditional love, marriage and family values, involved in multiple allegations of domestic violence, including involving children. How could they trust anyone else who would be on the show handing out roses?
Every story has an ending. All roses will wither. It may be time for “The Bachelor” to offer his final rose.
Contributors: Charles Trepany, Taijuan Moorman, Edward Segarra
