The Bachelor creator Mike Fleiss leaving franchise after 20+ years
In a statement per Variety, Fleiss confirmed the news by saying the following:
“I want to thank [Warner Bros. Television] and ABC for 21 extraordinary years … They’ve found the perfect creative team for me to entrust The Bachelor franchise and keep this lightening in a bottle bold and moving forward. Let the journey continue.”
Franchise veterans Claire Freeland, Jason Ehrlich and Bennett Graebner will be taking over as showrunners, and honestly, it feels like the series is due for a change. While clearly there have been a lot of successful elements to this franchise over the years, it also has become somewhat stale with its format over the years. Meanwhile, there has long been criticism of how the production has handled some of the contestants — the presentation of things on UnREAL (a fictional show) probably does not help anything in the end.
The news of Fleiss’ exit comes one day after the end of Zach Shallcross’ season; meanwhile, the next season of The Bachelorette featuring Charity Lawson is already in production. This could be when we start to see a few changes implemented, but we’ll see where things go moving forward into the rest of the franchise. Despite lower ratings, we don’t see it going anywhere in the near future. There’s still so much money to be made, especially since the average reality show is substantially cheaper than a lot of scripted counterparts. They could also cut costs here dramatically by doing less international travel, provided that they really want to do that.
No reason has been given for Fleiss’ exit at present.
Related – Learn more on when Charity’s season of The Bachelorette is going to premiere
What do you think about Mike Fleiss leaving The Bachelor franchise after so many years?
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This article was written by Jessica BunBun.