Over 20 years after the massively popular reality TV franchise began, producers of The Bachelor are finally offering some hope that we may see a queer-centric season of one of its series — someday.
“During my tenure on the show, the two spinoffs that have been pitched to be the most frequently are a Bachelor for older people and a gay Bachelor,” executive producer Bennett Graebner recently told Variety. “We checked one of those boxes. We’re talking about checking out the other box.”
Graebner is referring to the recent success of The Golden Bachelor, a spin-off featuring 72-year-old Gerry Turner looking for love among his age group — something that was so successful, in fact, that they’re already working on The Golden Bachelorette and hoping a similar twist on Bachelor in Paradise is possible.
But as refreshing as that is, it still feels like an egregious oversight that the Bachelor franchise has aired 48 seasons of the primary two series — not to mention numerous international and additional U.S.-based spin-offs — and still hasn’t featured a queer-centric season.
“We hope to get the opportunity to do that,” fellow EP Jason Ehrlich said. “The most wonderful thing is that love is universal and so is the frustration of not finding love. We’d love the opportunity to tell all kinds of people’s stories.”
Despite the lack of intentional queer match-making on the series, a number of its stars have come out as members of the LGBTQ+ community. Bachelor in Paradise had a little bit of queer love going on in a past season, and The Bachelor: Vietnam once had two contestants give up their quest to find love with the male lead after falling for one another instead.
In other words, it shouldn’t be difficult for the series to find contestants to participate in such a series, although convincing ABC to both greenlight it and promote it enough to draw an audience may be a different beast.
But if they do, we already know they can call Lance Bass up for that hosting gig!