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No, you're not imagining things: Gen Z is shaking up how reality shows like The Bachelor function within our world
Unlike older generations, Gen Z contestants on shows like The Bachelor were brought up on a diet of reality TV
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The Bachelor has been running for nearly 30 seasons on ABC, where it first launched in 2002. Now, in our year 2025, we're not far from getting contestants on the dating show who don't remember a world before The Bachelor existed. Or weren't even born into a Bachelor-less world.
The last thing I want to be is an old man born in the 20th century who is scared of everything born after his time, but I also can't dismiss the feeling that reality TV has, well, changed since Gen Z began to come of age. Gen Z is far more media literate than us millennials, who discovered our passion for graphic design through the wonders of WordArt in Microsoft Word while Clippy stared at us with his dead little eyes, a permanent witness to graphic design crimes against humanity. But I digress. To bring things back to focus, Rachel Lindsay from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette provided insightful commentary on this change in reality TV at LA Times' Festival of Books.
While talking about the recent changes that have happened for contestants on the show, Lindsay explained,
"With The Bachelor, particularly now, they saw so many people profit from the show with social media and appearances and different things that now, the contract is even more strict than when I was on it. You have to ask permission for everything. Because they want people to come on to the show who are genuine about finding love, rather than using it to catapult their career - which so many people do."
"The other dilemma is that now, the people that are coming on these reality shows grew up [watching] reality TV. While us millennials and Gen X, we didn't. So we were kind of just going through it, stumbling about, while [Gen Zs] know what to do... they become a certain character in order to have success in the show or what they deem as 'success.' So it's really hard for me to say what the exact thing to do to protect them."
This is not limited to just The Bachelor. Recently I made the masochistic decision to watch season 2 of Outlast on Netflix, and was struck by how one of the younger contestants on the season, Bri, who was 26 when the show was filmed, brought a completely different game sense to the competition. Bri is now a van life influencer on social media, proving Rachel Lindsay's point.
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About Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
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