Far from the Hail Mary it seems like, casting Mormon Wives’s Taylor Frankie Paul is the most on-brand decision the flailing franchise has made in a while.
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Breaking! There is a Taylor Frankie Paul addendum to the MomTok brand guidelines: “Becoming the next Bachelorette” is now listed in the Acceptable Side Gig section, right underneath “Going on Dancing With the Stars.”
Taylor Frankie Paul’s casting might sound at first like a wild choice for Bachelor Nation. The cornerstone of both the Emmy-nominated reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the “soft swinging” scandal from which the show was born, Paul is unapologetically messy. She’s divorced and has three children from two baby daddies. She’s quick to lose her temper and even quicker to post to social media, stoking the parasocial flames of the 5.5 million followers ready to ride on her behalf. She is also openly and devotedly Mormon. Casting her as the Bachelorette reads like a Hail Mary from a flailing franchise, and in some ways it is. The Bachelor and its spinoffs have been in a flop era for quite some time now. Ratings are down. Showrunners have quit owing to a “toxic workplace.” Since then, The Bachelor has brought in the showrunner from Summer House and a casting company known for hiring talent for various Real Housewives franchises. Since tinkering with the show’s rigid formula is likely off the table, a big bet on casting raw charisma is all that’s left.
For this season, that might be enough, because Taylor Frankie Paul is very good at being on reality television. Given the franchise’s history of cast-member manipulation, it’s a relief as a viewer to know someone who suffers no fools (besides her parents and a man named Dakota) is at the helm. Production might try to pull a Jenn Tran on Taylor Frankie Paul, but godspeed to them and their families should that occur. There is no woman like a MomTok mom scorned, and while Taylor Frankie Paul might let her men take her for a ride, she deeply understands the reality-TV machine. She is not ripe for producer manipulation because she lives her entire public life like she’s got nothing to lose. And yet beneath her TikTok-hardened exterior and dedication to chaos seems to be a yearning for the most classic Bachelor franchise desire ever: a strong, godly man who will be a good father to her children. Given that, casting Taylor Frankie Paul is actually one of the most on-brand decisions the franchise has made in a while.
The overlap in the Venn diagram of the beliefs of Mormons (especially the reality-TV variety) and the traditional values The Bachelor has long espoused is basically a circle. Both are devoted to the same hetero fairy tale; whether the wedding is happening in the temple or on national television is irrelevant. What matters is a heavy focus on aesthetic and moralistic perfection. One would think things like a long history of polyamorous behavior (in the religion and on the show!) would muddy this desire for purity, but if The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has taught us anything, it’s how to bend the Word of Wisdom to fit one’s desires. Extensive mental gymnastics are a requirement for entry. Coffee? Prohibited. Ketamine? Fine. Fucking someone who isn’t your husband? For both the women of MomTok and Bachelor Nation cast members off to fantasy suites, all that matters regarding perception of your purity is how you spin the narrative.
Taylor Frankie Paul is already a master of this, and it’ll be fascinating to see someone like her in action. There has long been subtle differences in the flavor of playful promiscuity required for a show like Love Island and the true-love traditionalism of The Bachelor, but we’ve yet to see someone with a Real Housewives–style reality-TV persona single-handedly steer the ship. Taylor Frankie Paul also likely has a different definition of what “winning” her season would look like compared with the classic Bachelor runner-up seeking a second chance at love. All of Taylor Frankie Paul’s prior reality-TV work has been centered on friendship drama, motherhood, and navigating the turmoil of a toxic relationship. She is both a newbie to pursuing Bachelor-style love and, as a woman who married her first husband in the temple, a total veteran.
The fact that Paul doesn’t need The Bachelorette to rise to fame opens more space for the sort of romanticized yearning that was a hallmark of early Bachelor seasons. Paul is definitely not here to make friends (or lose them, as is the MomTok way) because there will be no other women on set to create drama with. She’s not here to jump-start her influencer career; the paycheck is just another line item in her brand-deal accounting. So perhaps she’ll actually focus on what The Bachelorette has pretended to be about for more than 20 years: finding love.
What will be most telling is where Bachelor Nation goes next. How do you top a TikTok-famous LDS mom with a swinging scandal? Unless the franchise continues this outsider casting, it’s a slippery slope to being stuck in a mask-off world of hypertraditional values. It’s all fun and games when it’s Taylor Frankie Paul examining her relationship with alcohol, trying to figure out what feminism means, and educating newbies on the Mormon poophole loophole. It’s less so when you fast-forward to when the lead is some guy named Braysin who doesn’t believe women should be allowed to vote. Unfortunately, pretty apt given the state of the franchise that is “America.”
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