‘The Bachelorette’ Season 22: When the Drama is Too Much for Reality Television

Reality television shows love drama — in fact, they count on it. Shows such as “Love Island,” “The Bachelorette,” and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” follow relatively simple premises, relying on hot gossip to keep audiences engaged in the show. Recently, however, as the actions of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” star Taylor Frankie Paul have come to light, the temperature reached a fever pitch too high, even for reality television. This escalation prompted ABC to cancel the newest season of “The Bachelorette,” which Paul had starred in and was set to be released March 22, 2026 — just three days after the announcement was made. ABC’s decision, relatively unprecedented in the industry, indicated the heightened nature of this scandal.

Reality television is, by name, supposed to reproduce reality. But reality, as it is, tends to be boring. Watching ordinary people do ordinary tasks wouldn’t typically warrant a television show centered around their lives. Luckily for them, reality television stars are anything but. They scream at each other, stab one another in the back, and still always try to find ways to maintain audience sympathy. It’s this exact absurdity that keeps us watching: Outlandish behavior allows the average person a break from their lives, and the crazier, the better. For instance, the Season 4 finale of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” coming after a violent fight involving a $100 bill shoved in a waiter’s mouth, attracted a massive influx of 4.3 million viewers upon its release.

Reality television is no stranger to making entertainment out of abhorrent behavior — and we, the audience, secretly enjoy it. But when footage emerged last month of an alleged domestic violence incident involving Paul, something changed.

Paul is a social media influencer and reality television personality who has skyrocketed to fame in recent years through her work on “Secret Lives,” as well as being a contributor to MomTok — a group of TikTok influencers that highlight a community of mothers in the Mormon community. MomTok serves as the basis for “Secret Lives,” which follows eight of these women. Jeff Jenkins, the executive producer of the series, told Vanity Fair that the show was intended as an “escapist, glamorous, sexy show about young people.”

This pure image came crashing down after Paul came under fire for an alleged domestic violence incident in 2023.

On March 19, 2026, TMZ released a highly disturbing video, filmed by Paul’s then-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen, showing Paul behaving violently toward Mortensen and throwing metal barstools in his direction. At one point, one of the stools appears to strike her daughter, who was in the room during the fight.

Even as her daughter began to cry, Paul didn’t move to comfort or check on her. She continued the fight, screaming that it was Mortensen’s fault that her daughter had been hurt. The sound of the child crying and screaming for her mother, combined with Paul’s indifference towards her daughter’s suffering, makes the video an excruciating watch.

The image of Paul as a callous mother who does not flinch at having injured her daughter is strikingly at odds with the persona she has curated through her work on “Secret Lives” and MomTok. On a larger scale, the video also shreds the identity of “Secret Lives” as “escapist, glamorous, and sexy,” showing a much darker side of its main character and perhaps serving as a rude wakeup call to the audience.

A show can only be “escapist” so long as the drama is contained to the screen: A controlled environment in which everyone has chosen, by virtue of accepting the job, to be there. Consequently, there is always an assumed consent that everyone is there, yelling and being yelled at, because they want to be.

The glitz and glamour of the shows’ aesthetics foster this alternate world in which the people on TV are not people at all but glittering, larger-than-life caricatures whose words and actions can’t really hurt anyone who hasn’t already agreed to be hurt.

Paul’s video took the drama out of the intentionally messy setting of the show into the real world and brought attention to what audiences don’t normally get to see on reality television: the collateral damage. Paul’s innocent daughter, crying out in pain to a seemingly uncaring mother, is now forced into the story and must suffer the consequences.

Although newly released, this video depicts something that happened a long time ago, forcing audiences to confront the fact that despite her perfect blowout and curated social media feed, there has been a darker side to Paul’s story all along. In canceling the “Bachelorette,” ABC executives, too, seem to have realized that fanning the flames can only be entertaining for so long before someone gets burned.

—Staff writer Francesca H. Vittorelli can be reached at [email protected].