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It’s been a tough couple of weeks for Bachelor Nation. On June 12, news broke that Warner Bros. was investigating an incident of alleged misconduct on the set of Bachelor in Paradise in Mexico. Soon enough, anonymously sourced reports began to paint a grim, messy picture: two contestants, Corinne Olympios and DeMario Jackson, had reportedly gotten drunk and engaged in sexual acts—that didn’t include sex—in the pool. But their drunken state raised questions of consent—and whether a producer should have intervened. On Tuesday, Warner announced that it had concluded its investigation—and had found that footage of the incident “does not support any charge of misconduct by a cast member.”
But perhaps more surprising was the other part of the announcement: that Bachelor in Paradise’s fourth season would resume filming. Since the news of the alleged incident first broke, a conversation had been brewing about whether the scandal could not only bury the Bachelor spin-off, but also tarnish the brand as a whole. As the series resumes production, the answer to that first quandary remains to be seen. But as one veteran reality-TV producer sees it, this incident could very easily become water under the bridge for the long-running franchise.
Troy DeVolld, who wrote the book on reality TV—literally—and worked on The Bachelor’s sixth and seventh seasons, points out that the franchise is one of TV’s last remaining juggernauts: it’s been running for 21 seasons and enjoys a reliably massive following. The Bachelor will survive, DeVolld suspects, “because it’s just such a part of the fabric of everything.”
“I don’t think that viewers are that concerned with the reality of the ‘reality’ that they watch,” DeVolld said in an interview Saturday—before the investigation’s conclusions had been made public. “The Bachelor does a nice job of making everything beautiful. If my life came with that many cymbal shimmers, I can’t tell you how happy I’d be.”
The only thing DeVolld could see taking down the series? Fans might jump ship, DeVolld said, not as a result of any shady contestant conduct, but if they found out that the results were fixed from the start. “It would take a major blow to the integrity of the show itself and its construction to take it down,” DeVolld said. “Individual incidents, I don’t think, ever would.”
Mind you, DeVolld knows exactly how serious the situation is—it’s just that, well, we’ve seen it all before. Consider the Real World franchise, which DeVolld pointed out faced an allegation of sexual assault that ended in a settlement, yet still has not been canceled.
“I worry about this woman; I worry about the guy,” DeVolld said, referring to Olympios and Jackson. “He said/she said things are never good. But in the big picture, I just don’t see it as the kind of situation that takes down the series.”
Even discounting the Bachelor in Paradise scandal, the Bachelor franchise has found itself under the microscope in recent years. Lifetime found critical acclaim with UnREAL, a series created by a veteran Bachelor producer that launched in 2015 and provides a fictional look behind the scenes of a Bachelor–esque series. And during JoJo Fletcher’s season of The Bachelorette last year, Chad Johnson’s rapid rise to prominence spurred a conversation around how reality-TV production can shape the narratives surrounding various players, particularly those cast as villains.
One person who knows all about that? Olivia Caridi, who served as a villain herself on Ben Higgins’s season of The Bachelor. Caridi has long been open about the fact that she doesn’t love the way she came off on the show, but said that she had “always” wanted to do Bachelor in Paradise—until now. Caridi was actually offered a slot this season, but ultimately passed—a decision she is now very glad to have made.
“It’s funny, because there was something in my mind that just was holding me back—there was this intuition that this might not be the time,” Caridi said in an interview days after news of the Warner Bros. investigation broke. “And as all of this is coming out, I’m really glad that I didn’t do it, because I would hate to be physically involved in something like this.”
Although DeVolld—who cannot discuss specifics about his time on The Bachelor because of a non-disclosure agreement—said the show’s producers and editors do not cut the show to create the illusion of situations and interactions that never actually happened during filming, a recently surfaced contestant contract tells a different story. The contract, obtained by CNN, grants Bachelor producers “the right to change, add to, take from, edit, translate, reformat or reprocess . . . in any manner Producer may determine in its sole discretion.” Entertainment attorney Nicole Page translated the contract for CNN: “I can basically take your image and do whatever I want with it and I own it and you have no recourse.” Page noted that the contract is pretty standard in the reality industry.
And as CNN points out, it seems the franchise has created the illusion of eccentricity in the past:
Caridi was unambiguously clear that everyone on the show is treated as an adult, and no one is forced to do anything—including drinking. (Caridi said that she herself was sober throughout her season of The Bachelor.) Still, she noted that producers certainly encourage contestants to interact with certain other contestants, throwing out as an example that Corinne might have been told that she and DeMario would make a good pair. Whatever happened on set in Mexico, Caridi said that the scandal has tainted the franchise.
“I just feel like there is this dark cloud over this franchise now, and I think this situation will and has affected how people look at the show. And how I look at the show. It‘s just sad. This thing that used to be really fun has now been tarnished in my eyes . . . When you play with fire so much, and you play with people’s lives, and you put them in situations where—stuff like this—you know, when you’re drinking and wanting to make good television, stuff happens, and it gets messy, and I don’t know if we’ll ever know the real story.”
Then again, none of this matters if DeVolld is correct in thinking that viewers don’t care about the real-life circumstances behind the reality TV they consume—and once the ratings for this season of Bachelor in Paradise are in, we’ll know for sure.
