‘The Bachelor’ Franchise Is Hoping This Season Will Rebuild The Brand

Man give red rose

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Those tuning in to the newest season of The Bachelor this week might have noticed that things felt a bit different than they have in the past.

Sure, there were the usual talks of finding true love, but it felt a bit more genuine. Almost as if that’s the goal of this season. To break down this noticeable shift, podcast host Kate Casey invited Lizzy Pages and Chad Kultgen, hosts of Game of Roses, to discuss what this means.

“Going through 2022, all of those shows, we saw the leads get abused, we saw the players get abused to levels we have never really seen,” said Kultgen. “It became hard to watch.”

The escalated drama on the show started to go beyond that of a typical reality show and it began to turn fans off to the entire franchise. Kultgen feels that Rodney Matthews being dumped on the most recent season of Bachelor in Paradise was when fans and contestants alike hit their emotional limit.

“That moment to me, was kind of like the final straw for a lot of viewers of the show,” he said. “The audience felt the same as the players at that point.”

The host hopes the producers learned their lesson and Pages said the pair is curious about the thought process that went into this bachelor specifically. Zach Shallcross is the man of the hour every Monday night, but the show has still not explored who the new bachelor is as a person.

“Chad and I definitely think that there was an element of wanting the bachelor to be somewhat pliable and easy to guide and steer around,” said Page. “That’s our main theory for why they chose Zach Shallcross who they hadn’t really built up as a character at all and kind of still haven’t.”

Kultgen and Pages are predicting that Shallcross will get engaged at the end of the season and make it last six months. They suspect that’s what the producers asked of him when they brought him on as the new bachelor. But who are these two, and what are their qualifications on what it takes to be a contestant? Well, they actually wrote the book on it: How to Win The Bachelor: The Secret to Finding Love and Fame on America's Favorite Reality Show.

Listen to “THE BACHELOR PREMIERE WITH GAME OF ROSES PODCAST” to hear the full discussion around the season premiere of The Bachelor. Find Reality Life with Kate Casey and Game of Roses on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If you want to be sure you’re listening to the podcasts everyone else is checking out, iHeartRadio has you covered.   

Every Monday, iHeartRadio releases a chart showing the most popular podcasts of the week. Stay up to date on what’s trending by checking out the chart here. There’s even a chart just for radio podcasts featuring all your favorite iHeartRadio personalities like Bobby Bones, Elvis Duran, Steve Harvey, and dozens of others. 


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