‘The Bachelor’ let down its first Black male lead. Will it do better by Jenn Tran?

As the first Asian American Bachelorette, Jenn Tran is very aware of the added responsibility she carries. 

“I want to be able to make everybody proud and make my heritage proud,” Tran, a 26-year-old physician assistant student, said during the season premiere Monday. “I think what it really comes down to is that I just have to be myself and do the best that I can do.”

Indeed, already Tran is everything you’d want a Bachelorette to be: funny, bubbly, telegenic, open to new experiences and excited to find love. She can declare it “shot o’clock” one moment and then sit down for an earnest conversation about shared family history the next. (Bachelorettes can do it all!) There’s no question that Tran will be a capable lead — one episode in, she’s already shown herself to be a great choice. However, the jury is still out on whether a television franchise steeped in institutional racism is capable of doing right by her.

When Tran was named the next Bachelorette back in March, the announcement was met with shock and excitement from Asian fans of the franchise. “I’ve watched #TheBachelorette since its first season and never thought I’d see the day we’d get an Asian American lead!” tweeted Washington Post reporter Jada Yuan, who watched the announcement live from a bar in Brooklyn, New York, and witnessed the pure joy of the two Vietnamese American women sitting next to her.

After all, fans of color have come to expect as little as possible from “The Bachelor” franchise.

The show’s less-than-stellar diversity track record is common knowledge at this point. For years, fans darkly joked about the way that contestants of color would show up for a week or two but never became serious contenders. After a class action lawsuit was filed in 2012 — the show began airing in 2002 — “The Bachelor” seemed to work a bit harder to inject racial diversity into its dating pool. But there were still no Black leads until Rachel Lindsay’s season of “The Bachelorette” in 2017, and the franchise took even longer to cast a Black man in the lead role, finally casting Matt James in 2020, the year George Floyd’s death at the hands of police set off national protests and a national racial reckoning.

But the casting of Lindsay and James also proved that true representation is about more than ticking a box. Both grappled with the challenges of being a highly visible first while working within a show infrastructure that wasn’t equipped to support them.

“I’m going to be really frank — we let Matt down,” executive producer Bennett Graebner told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published shortly before the beginning of Tran’s season. “That season went wrong on so many levels,” Graebner said, calling the show’s 15-year wait for a Black lead “inexcusable.” “We did not protect him as we should have.” 

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Chris Harrison steps aside as ‘Bachelor’ host after controversial comments February 15, 2021 / 02:13

Graebner and fellow EP Claire Freeland seem ready to answer publicly for the franchise’s long-running failures — failures that didn’t stop with James’ season. Freeland came on board from the Canadian “Bachelor” franchise after creator Mike Fleiss was ousted in 2023 after a Warner Bros. investigation into allegations of racial discrimination made against him. (Fleiss told Variety he was “proud of the work we’ve done over the past five years to make the show substantially more diverse, but I do believe I could have done more. Hopefully, the franchise will continue to move in the right direction.”) Earlier this year, the American show came under fire after Rachel Nance, who made it to the final three on Joey Graziadei’s season of “The Bachelor” and is biracial, said she was subjected to a barrage of racist messages after her hometown date.

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“I got a lot of hateful messages … calling me the N-word or jungle Asian, all because I got a rose,” Nance told host Jesse Palmer during the women tell-all special. “It’s sad because my parents really enjoyed the hometown episode, and for them to see people attacking our culture and attacking me — I’ve been in this scenario before, but this was like a whole new level.”

Instead of calling this what it was — racism from the show’s own fan base — Palmer asked all of the cast members if they had received hateful messages, and then asked the audience to temper their “strong opinions” in favor of “uplifting” the people who go on the show. (Freeland acknowledged to the L.A. Times that this segment “was another missed opportunity.” “Our intention was to bring light toward what Rachel was going through,” she said. “But we have to do better.”)

This long history makes it hard to believe that even the noblest of intentions from producers will make a real difference for the people of color who are generous enough to share their lives and stories with millions of people each season. And even meaningful incremental changes from the show’s production team do not shield cast members from the racist aggressions of the fans that the franchise cultivated for years and years. Amid all of the Instagram posts from Tran excitedly boosting her season, she also reposted a commenter who noted, “We wanted white skin and blonde hair.”

I have long wondered if and when “The Bachelor” franchise would be forced to choose between conservative white viewers who want to see the show remain as it was in its heyday when everyone was an evangelical dental hygienist and Black contestants never made it past week three, and more progressive viewers who have been vocally pushing for change from their problematic fave. For years, the show has tried to make both groups happy using cosmetic tweaks that never really addressed the rot at the core. The L.A. Times piece indicates that an affirmative choice has finally been made. Probably.

“We can’t change the minds of people who aren’t interested in this new direction. What we have the power to do is change the program,” Freeland told the L.A. Times. Graebner was even more explicit: “If you don’t want to see a Black love story, an Asian American love story, an interracial love story, then maybe Bachelor Nation isn’t for you.”

The sentiment is a great one, and one that so many members of Bachelor Nation have been waiting years to hear. But these words only have meaning if they’re backed up by action. So now we wait, and cheer for Jenn Tran. Here’s hoping she finds the love she deserves and doesn’t become a sacrificial lamb to the show’s growth.