FANS of The Bachelor franchise are always eager to peel back the layers of the show’s production ahead of each season and learn more about the show’s filming logistics.
Season 21 of The Bachelorette will be one to watch, featuring Jenn Tran as the first Asian woman to lead the Bachelor Nation franchise series in its 21-year history.
Is The Bachelorette real or scripted?
For the most part, The Bachelorette is real, but former contestants have provided insight into some of the show’s somewhat scripted elements.
Bachelor and Bachelorette contracts allegedly state that contestants must “follow all of Producer’s rules, directions and instructions in all matters, including Participant selection.”
In former Bachelor Sean Lowe’s memoir, For the Right Reasons, he revealed that he filmed some of his confessionals weeks after dates would happen.
“I’d say things like, ‘I’m having a blast with Des tonight, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.’ It wasn’t disingenuous, because I expressed what my true feelings were at the time.”
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“Mainly, it was boring,” he added.
Although the show doesn’t follow a strict script, the footage is edited to fit a narrative.
Contestant Luke Stone once called out Bachelor in Paradise producers and claimed that episode footage was edited to look like he was rejected.
In February 20234, former contestant Mari Pepin, who appeared on Matt James’ season of The Bachelor and later starred in Bachelor in Paradise, also dropped a major bombshell.
She revealed that the show uses “frankenbiting” to stir up drama.
“Frakenbiting is when they take little snippets of audio and they kind of like weave it together to form a sentence and now to me it’s really obvious,” she said, as reported by The Mirror US.
“But sometimes they’re really good at hiding it,” she continued.
“So they’ll take part of this sentence and part of that sentence and make the person sound like they just put it together.”
Is Jenn Tran from The Bachelorette engaged?
On June 26, 2024, Jenn Tran appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast.
While she didn’t share who she was engaged to, she accidentally confirmed she got engaged during the show’s finale.
“I didn’t know once you get engaged,” Jenn shared in the interview, then quickly changed her statement to “once you find love, you can’t take a shot.”
The rumor mill had already gone to work earlier in the year, when a gossip blog and podcast revealed Jenn’s final two – and the man she ended up getting engaged to.
“This season definitely breaks the mold in a lot of different ways,” Jenn exclusively told Us Weekly.
“I never saw myself as a main character [and] I never saw myself as someone with that much confidence, and so what I really learned is that it’s not about fitting a mold of the Bachelorette,” Jenn revealed.
“It’s about being able to just be yourself the best that you can, and that’s really what my whole journey is about — me being myself and embracing all of my flaws and everything that makes me unique.”
Jenn first appeared on Season 28 of The Bachelor, which featured Joey Graziadei as the lead, but was eliminated before hometowns.
“I truly was on the edge of my seat every day,” she added.
“I was like, ‘Something new is happening,’ and I was just constantly surprised. So, I would say the journey itself included a lot of twists and turns that I was surprised by — including the ending.”
On May 31, 2024, Stephen Carbone from Reality Steve revealed some major spoilers from Jenn’s season.
He posted both the final two contestants vying for Jenn’s heart, and the lucky man she ended up getting engaged to.
Jenn’s overnight episodes, dubbed “Fantasy Suites” by Bachelor Nation, and the finale were filmed in Hawaii.
Her final two men were Marcus Shoberg and Devin Strader.
Shoberg is an Army Ranger Veteran and Harvard alum.
Strader owns and operates F1 Freight Consultants, “a full-scale, dedicated Truckload, and LTL service provider, that offers top-tier transportation services and solutions to a wide variety of industries,” according to his LinkedIn.
The “winner” of the season, otherwise known as the man who proposed to Jenn, is rumored to be Devin Strader.
“I can say that I definitely opened my heart up to a lot of different connections and explored a lot of these,” Jenn said.
“The way that things panned out throughout the journey and the way that things ended, I’m very happy about [it],” she added.
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How can I watch The Bachelorette Season 21?
Season 21 of The Bachelorette premieres on Monday, July 8, 2024.
The first episode will air on ABC at 8 pm ET, 7 pm CT.
Hulu + Live TV subscribers can also watch new episodes live every Monday.
New episodes will also be available to stream the following day on Hulu with a paid subscription.
Previous seasons of The Bachelor, the Bachelorette, Bachelor in Paradise, and The Golden Bachelor are currently available for streaming on Hulu.
The show, hosted by former Bachelor Jesse Palmer, is produced by Next Entertainment and Warner Bros. Unscripted Television in association with Warner Horizon.
Executive producers include Jason Ehrlich, Tim Warner, and Peter Gust, Bennett Graebner, and Claire Freeland.
Graebner and Freeland notably discussed the franchise’s history of racial controversies and lack of diversity during a candid interview with The Los Angeles Times in June 2024.