On the Bachelorette Cancellation: The Part I Can’t Shake

I spent the afternoon at the playground pretending to be a super kitty, and the early evening in my backyard drinking a “sparkle rainbow” brew out of a tiny teacup. But in the back of my mind, while a child narrated her own adventures, Taylor Frankie Paul was living completely rent-free.

I couldn’t stop circling the news.

The Bachelorette was canceled today, suddenly, just days before the premiere. A video surfaced that I really wish I could unsee. It shows Taylor throwing chairs. Her daughter is in the room. A child is crying. It’s not a rumor or a headline you can soften. It’s just... there. 

And the part I’m struggling with is that I actually liked her.

Watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, I saw a woman who looked like she was drowning. She was tangled in a relationship that clearly wasn't working, living inside a culture that didn't seem to give her many tools to get out. I felt a lot of sympathy for her — the kind you feel when you’re rooting for someone to finally break a cycle you can see they're trapped in.

Then I watched that video.

As viewers, we usually want people to be one thing: the victim or the villain. We like clean categories. But Taylor has always refused to fit into them. It’s a reminder of a really uncomfortable truth: a person can be failed by the people around them and still be the one doing the failing in a given moment. Those two things can exist in the same person, at the same time.

That’s the part that’s hard to sit with.

I also can’t help but look at the machine behind it all. ABC knew about the 2023 arrest; it was practically the marketing hook for her first show. They watched the ratings climb and decided to give her an even bigger platform. It feels less like they were supporting her journey and more like they were just consuming her chaos until it finally became too much to broadcast.

So, I’m left as a viewer with conflicting feelings.

I think the only thing to do is just... feel them. I’m trying not to flatten this into a "hot take." I’m trying to sit with the fact that you can grieve the version of someone you were rooting for while being honest about what you saw. A chair hit her daughter. She hit her ex. To me, that’s where the conversation has to start and end.

Reality TV is often a mirror. We watch these women — especially in a culture that demands they perform perfection — and we see what happens when the cameras show up before the healing does.

I don’t know what’s next for her. I truly hope she finds actual help, away from a camera lens. I hope her kids, and everyone else harmed, are okay. But for now, I’m just sitting with the discomfort of it all, knowing I won’t turn the show back on.