Unpack the new season of ‘The Bachelorette’ with The Most Dramatic Newsletter Ever
That’s right: It’s the return of “The Bachelorette.”
Longtime Bachelor fans will know that every single season, host Chris Harrison looks somberly to the camera and assures us, the teeming masses, that this will be the most dramatic season ever. This year, we have to admit, it may actually be true — which is why we made The Most Dramatic Newsletter Ever to guide you through every twist and turn.
On Tuesday, Oct. 13, the nation will huddle together around our television screens, surrounded by the detritus of eight months indoors, and ask ourselves a question as old as time: Can 39-year-old Sacramento hairdresser Clare Crawley find love on reality TV?
We’ll send you newsletters the day after each episode, for as many weeks as it takes to get Neil Lane on-screen flogging his diamonds to a soon-to-be-brokenhearted man. You’ll get your first newsletter on Sept. 30.
Here’s what you can look forward to in the newsletter each week:
- The kind of hard-hitting investigative reporting you can expect from the newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein. Just, you know, about reality TV and not Richard Nixon.
- Exclusive interviews with the most intriguing characters of Bachelor Nation.
- Each week’s most ridiculous quote, memorialized for you to treasure forever.
- Analysis from my colleague Jacob Brogan, who will bring you all the hottest takes an overly academic newspaper editor can muster.
What makes this season (and newsletter) unmissable:
This will be a season like none before. For one, Clare is an elder stateswoman of Bachelor Nation at 39 years old. She also happens to be a natural-born reality star, forged in a laboratory by scientists to live and breathe the melodrama we all crave.
ABC pulled the plug on Clare’s journey for love back in March, right as it was set to begin. By July, though, the show went back into production, filming entirely in a quarantine bubble. Rather than traveling between far-flung corners of the globe, contestants will lurk in a California villa from which there is no escape. (There are, however, 41 swimming pools.)
If you hope to go into this season utterly spoiler-free, skip over the next few paragraphs until you see the word BADGERS.
As if the pandemic drama weren’t enough, this season will feature a not-so-secret plot twist in which Clare Crawley reportedly leaves the show midproduction. Why? Love, that’s why. Specifically, love with 31-year-old football player-slash-model Dale Moss. Maybe after four previous attempts at love in the Bachelor universe, you get more efficient at finding the one.
The show has kept mum about the switch-up, but US Weekly reported that the producers scrambled to bring in backup contestants after Clare absconded with her football model. With the swiftness of a daytime soap opera recasting, though, producers replaced Clare with Tayshia Adams, the third-place finisher on Colton Underwood’s season.
We will see how the show’s cast pivot their hearts to a new love interest mid-falling-in-love. And friends, this is merely a sampling of the drama this season promises.
Ok, BADGERS! It’s safe. Congratulations to the spoiler-free, you are made of strong stuff.
Let me be your trusty guide
After many years of love- and hate-watching the Bachelor franchise in all its forms, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a very important show, whether we like to admit it or not. It’s a window into American culture in its most mainstream form. It shows us what is considered attractive or unattractive, acceptable or unacceptable in the realm of dating. It shows us who is included and excluded from American love stories. What will it show us in a year like 2020?
Also, look: It’s just extremely relaxing to sit on the couch with a goblet of red wine and heckle your television for two hours, and we could all use that right now.
So please, join us on this journey. Will you accept this newsletter?
