Taylor Frankie Paul’s Canceled ‘Bachelorette’ Season Highlights the

Taylor Frankie Paul’s “Bachelorette” season was shaping up to be the Most Dramatic Season Ever. Now, it will go down in history as the Most Dramatic Season to Never Exist.

In September, the decision to cast 31-year-old Paul, a TikToker and the star of Hulu’s hit reality series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” as the next Bachelorette was framed as a groundbreaking change of pace for the famously risk-averse juggernaut. The long-running franchise’s ratings have been in steady decline since the late 2010s, so things were finally dire enough to cast their first lead from outside the franchise. Enter Paul, a messy single mom whose exploits on “Mormon Wives” had already buoyed ABC’s Disney-owned sister network to record-breaking ratings.

It was a surprisingly big swing for the network that was praised for promising to breathe new life into the franchise. But when you swing that big, you have to be ready to whiff spectacularly.

That’s what happened on Wednesday, when the network made the decision to pull the plug on Paul’s season of “The Bachelorette” amid a police investigation into a February incident of alleged domestic violence between Paul and her ex, Dakota Mortensen, and the leak of a disturbing video from Paul’s previously reported altercation with Mortensen in 2023.

Never mind the gauntlets of already-completed press, the estimated $8.2 million in TV promos, or the fact that the season had already wrapped filming and was set to premiere in three days’ time. The dream was over for Paul.

Perhaps it’s time the dream of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” is, too.

Casting Taylor Frankie Paul was always going to be risky

Chaos has always been Paul’s brand. Before Paul was poised to be the star of not one but two television shows, she was the self-destructive and eminently watchable leader of MomTok, a loose collection of Mormon moms who make TikToks together in Utah. Though the women gained followings for their perfect barrel curls and silly dancing videos, it was a bombshell 2022 video of Paul admitting to “soft swinging” with other members of MomTok and their husbands that catapulted her and her circle of friends to infamy — and got them a Hulu reality show.

Hulu learned early in…