ABC has apparently decided that the path to ratings runs directly through the wreckage of Utah's influencer community. Taylor Frankie Paul, the Mormon mom whose soft-swinging scandal detonated MomTok in 2022 and whose domestic violence arrest made headlines in 2023, is now getting her own Bachelorette-style dating show, targeted to premiere next month.
The casting choice is so deliberately provocative it almost circles back to boring. Of course the network that once presented the Bachelorette as a fairy-tale search for lasting love would eventually hand roses to a woman best known for admitting to group intimacy arrangements within her supposedly devout social circle. The only surprise is that it took this long.
The MomTok-to-mainstream pipeline
Paul first gained notoriety on TikTok as part of a group of young, photogenic Mormon mothers whose content mixed faith-adjacent aesthetics with lifestyle aspiration. The facade cracked spectacularly when Paul's divorce revealed that several couples in the group had been engaged in consensual partner-swapping—a revelation that scandalized Mormon communities and delighted everyone else. Her subsequent arrest on domestic violence charges, later reduced, only amplified her tabloid profile.
What ABC sees in Paul is precisely what made her infamous: the collision of performative purity and messier reality. The network has spent years watching competitors like Bravo mine this territory with Housewives franchises. Paul offers a younger demographic entry point with built-in notoriety.
The Bachelor franchise's identity crisis
The move signals how far the Bachelor universe has drifted from its original premise. The franchise once sold viewers on the possibility of genuine romance emerging from absurd circumstances. Now it increasingly functions as a rehabilitation vehicle for social-media personalities seeking to extend their relevance. Paul doesn't need to find love on television; she needs to find a narrative that supersedes her arrest record.
ABC's calculation is transparent: controversy drives conversation, and conversation drives streaming numbers. The network has watched Netflix's reality slate generate enormous engagement through figures whose appeal lies more in their chaos than their charm.
Our take
There's something almost admirable about ABC's refusal to pretend this is anything other than what it is—a cynical bet that audiences will tune in to watch a scandal-plagued influencer navigate romantic theater. The Bachelorette stopped being about love the moment producers realized that Instagram followers mattered more than compatibility. Paul is simply the logical endpoint of that evolution: a contestant whose entire qualification is that people already know her name, and not for flattering reasons. Whether she finds a husband is irrelevant. Whether she trends on Monday nights is the only metric that matters.
