From Nick Viall announcing an age-gap dating show to Clayton Echard crashing Perfect Match and Colton Underwood taking on a new co-hosting gig, something seems to be in the water right now.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Craig Sjodin, Joe Scarnici, Jon Kopaloff)
It started in July, when I saw Nick Viall abusing his sacred platform as Secret Lives of Mormon Wives reunion host to dump all over the show’s perennial heel, Whitney Leavitt. Then Peter Weber parlayed his controversial Traitors run into more free international travel (and another shot at reality fame) on NBC’s Destination X. And then Clayton Echard showed up on Perfect Match to humiliate Rachel Recchia all over again on global streaming television.
Friends, countrymen, fellow trash-TV raccoons: I’m sorry to announce that this summer belongs to Bachelor villains. As reality TV fully steps into its Avengers era, the search is on for charismatic B-list stars with unfinished business, and these well-monetized anti-heroes are cashing in. Some of these guys are farther down the road than others when it comes to making us forget the thornier portions of their Bachelor legacies, but all of them presumably hope that new projects will help them court audiences’ good graces — both within and especially outside of Bachelor Nation.
Take Clayton’s return to viral infamy on Perfect Match season three, which premiered on August 1. In the past, Netflix has only cast participants from its own shows, but this summer, the streamer expanded its player pool to include former Bachelors, Islanders, and more. This mimics the cross-pollination we’ve seen proliferating on shows like Peacock’s The Traitors, which has become TV’s ultimate dramatic melting pot. Perfect Match producers likely knew that plopping Clayton and Rachel into the same romantic villa meant tapping into a larger saga — one that lies at the center of a sprawling follower network. The Bachelor is, after all, one of TV’s hottest incubators for rising influencers.
It makes sense that Perfect Match would look to capitalize on the wreckage from the mess that was Clayton’s 2022 Bachelor season. For those who have erased the debacle from their memories: Clayton (who now has 283,000 Instagram followers) created a rose-colored catastrophe when he told all three finalists that he loved them and had been intimate with two of them. Those two women, Rachel (615,000 followers) and Gabby Windey (1.5 million followers), went on to become Bachelorettes — and while Rachel later returned to Bachelor in Paradise, Gabby found even bigger fame on The Traitors, where she turned Clayton’s incredible bag-fumble into the best-delivered coming-out story of all time. Meanwhile, Clayton’s third finalist, Susie Evans (400,000 followers), left his season after his confession only to return in the “After the Final Rose” special, where she and Clayton revealed that they’d reunited. The two broke up later that year, and this summer, Susie shook things up in Paradise. It’s not hard to imagine why producers guessed that putting Clayton and Rachel together in a dramatic resort could make for good TV: Where do they even stand now?
And so, on Perfect Match, the two find themselves reunited in episode three, where Clayton persuades Rachel to match with him (against her better judgment) only to break up with her hours later, citing his “intuition.” As one might imagine, Rachel is not pleased and tells the women that Clayton “doesn’t give a shit about” her if he’s willing to do this again. Ultimately, she finds a new match in the house and Clayton is eliminated.
Predictable as this mess might have been to Bachelor fans, Clayton–Rachel Redux speaks to a crucial aspect of this crossover approach. Presumably, casting directors looking for seasoned reality stars would prioritize players who bring potential drama with them — which is why so many alumni travel in pairs. For example, The Traitors season two reunited Big Brother demigods Janelle Pierzina and Dan Gheesling, who first faced off in BB14, while season three allowed Britney Haynes to mend fences with Danielle Reyes after her betrayal in Big Brother Reindeer Games, only for the relationships to blow up again in the end. That need for ongoing beef helps explain why Bachelor villains seem to be booking more gigs than successful leading men who’ve wrapped up their seasons and gotten engaged without any hard feelings.
Clayton feels like a perfect example of this phenomenon. Perfect Match producers knew he and Rachel’s past drama could entice viewers from another fan base, and for Clayton, the return offered a potential path to televised redemption. He’s spoken at length about his, erm, strong feelings about the way he was portrayed on The Bachelor and the hard work he’s done to become a better person anyway. This April, ahead of his Perfect Match appearance, he told Bachelor Happy Hour that upon returning from The Bachelor and realizing that everyone “hated” him, he discovered, “I hate myself, too.” And so he decided “to build up the real version” of himself — a process that involved growing out his curly hair, getting an earring, and practicing “mindfulness.” Alas, none of that mindfulness could stop Clayton from roping Rachel in and then promptly rejecting her yet again. Sometimes the siren call of poetic irony is just too hard to ignore.
Bachelor villains with built-in beef may be a boon to producers looking for a shortcut to onscreen drama, but in some cases, offscreen controversy can be an obstacle on the road to redemption. Consider former Bachelor Colton Underwood, who will soon co-host a new reality show for Hulu. On one hand, it figures that someone would dust off Colton for this gig; his Bachelor season was one of the better entries in recent memory, and his old “Virgin Bachelor” branding is a natural fit for the Hulu series, titled Are You My First?, which flies a group of virgins to a tropical paradise in search of love and intimacy. At the same time, I can’t imagine the series is eager to remind viewers that Colton’s Bachelor winner, Cassie Randolph, filed for a restraining order, accusing him of stalking her and planting a tracking device in her car. Two months after filing for the order, Cassie asked that her request be dismissed with prejudice, and Colton came out as gay a year later. “I never want people to think that I’m coming out to change the narrative, or to brush over and not take responsibility for my actions, and now that I have this gay life that I don’t have to address my past as a straight man,” Colton told Variety at the time. Later on in the interview, he said he was “sorry” for what he’d done and wanted Cassie “to know that I hope she has the best, most beautiful life.”
With so many Bachelor virgins to choose from, it’s perplexing that the gig went to one who comes with so much baggage. Did Bachelor Nation’s unproblematic fave and first virgin leading man, Sean Lowe, leave producers on read? Was Ashley Iaconetti not interested? I’m just saying, there were other options. Colton’s co-host, Kaitlyn Bristowe, has said on her podcast that she and Cassie are friends, and that she got Cassie’s blessing before working with Colton, but whether that’s enough to assuage fans’ skepticism toward the casting remains to be seen. And if it’s not, well, Colton will soon have another shot to try and win them over, since he’s also set to appear in The Traitors season four.
Right now, a quick appearance on The Traitors seems to be the fastest path to redemption for a Bachelor villain. First, there was Arie Luyendyk Jr., who is most famous in Bachelor Nation for being the guy who proposed to Becca Kufrin, only to stage the most humiliating breakup in human history less than two months later. I physically recoiled when he showed up on The Traitors season one, but I’ll admit that by the end, I found his lighthearted commentary endearing. When he chose to banish himself at the very end, he solidified his status as a changed man. Then, in season two, there was Peter Weber — best known to BN as the guy who had sex in a windmill four times during Hannah Brown’s season and then became the Bachelor, only to alienate his chosen lady so much that by the time “After the Final Rose” rolled around, she was telling him off onstage. On The Traitors, he became an ultradedicated Faithful — charming some of his skeptics, myself included, while annoying others, like fellow players Parvati Shallow and Kate Chastain.
Nick Viall’s rebrand has taken longer than those of his contemporaries, but it’s also been the most successful. He first irked Bachelor Nation on The Bachelorette season ten, where he antagonized the other men by calling himself the “front-runner” and infamously asking Bachelorette Andi Dorfman, “If you didn’t love me, then why did you make love with me?” In Bachelorette season 11, Nick crashed the party and once again rubbed the other men (and many viewers) the wrong way in pursuit of Bristowe, whose ultimate pick, Shawn Booth, called him cocky and manipulative to his face. After a friendlier edit in Paradise season three, where Nick dated Jen Saviano, he became the next Bachelor and got engaged to Vanessa Grimaldi, but the pair broke up within months. The real accomplishment, however, is his podcast, The Viall Files, which recently netted him a $30 million deal with the hosting platform Libsyn.
Nick’s momentum shows no signs of slowing down. In July, he announced that he and his wife would soon host a Netflix dating show about age-gap relationships inspired by their own 19-year age difference. The couple’s age disparity has sparked some controversy online in the past, but that hasn’t stopped Nick before.
Meanwhile, as former Bachelors pop up onscreen left and right to claim their redemption arcs, it’s hard not to notice how rarely the controversial women in this franchise receive the same opportunities. While female Survivor and Big Brother villains seem to have no trouble collecting their flowers, most vilified Bachelor women wind up back in ABC’s walled garden on Bachelor in Paradise, where they must redeem themselves by dating some of the blandest men imaginable. In fact, I can think of only two female Bachelor villains who’ve parlayed their explosive reputations into any kind of mainstream success: Demi Burnett, who recently appeared on Hulu’s amateur-escape-artist competition show Got to Get Out, and Corinne Olympios, who became a fan favorite on E!’s House of Villains in 2023 and showed up on Below Deck as a charter guest this spring. Where is, say, Courtney Robertson’s Netflix dating show? Tragically for all of us, we’ll probably never get one.
For now, at least, it seems that casting directors look at Bachelor villains with the same “I can fix it” attitude that many heterosexual women bring to their real-life relationships with single men who wash their faces with dish soap. We all just want to see them get it together, these producers predict; we know they can. But maybe, just maybe, we also get a dark-sided thrill every time they give their exes a reason to gossip.