‘The Bachelor’: ABC Executive Rob Mills on Realizing They ‘Needed to Play up’ Barb Weber’s Feelings Toward Madison Prewett

Peter Weber’s mother, Barbara, certainly has some strong feelings about her son’s final Bachelor pick, Madison Prewett. She made it clear during their visit in Australia, and again during the taped finale, that she doesn’t feel the foster parent recruiter is a good fit for her son.

ABC definitely picked up on the dynamic.

‘The Bachelor’ played up ‘very emotional’ Barb

Executive Rob Mills recently spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the finale and about realizing they “had a star on [their] hands with Peter’s mother, Barbara.”

“You can go back to last season with Hannah Brown and, certainly, her cheering and applauding her son’s prowess in the windmill (laughs) was a great moment. The parents are always great. Most of them are stars in their own right. I remember JoJo [Fletcher]’s mom chugging wine out of a bottle. But, as you saw in the clips of her with the whole ‘Bring her home’ moment, Barbara is very emotional,” began Mills.

He continued: “Peter and Madison hadn’t seen each other until up until a few weeks ago and hearing that Barbara really wasn’t pleased about that was when we realized this was an issue. And it’s a real issue that everyone deals with. Because when you’re entering into a relationship, certainly when you’re thinking about marriage, family is a big part. You are marrying into that family. At that point, we knew this was an angle that we really needed to play up. We knew Barbara was going to be great.”

Weber knew how his mother felt about Prewett (he still lives at home, after all), but even he seemed surprised at how she behaved during the taped finale. Mills says the moments Barbara spoke up about Prewett weren’t particularly planned.

“It was pretty much like, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ You don’t want to overproduce it or anything. You want it to play pretty real in the moment and that was what it was. There were definitely indications that Barbara was not happy, and I think not happy about a lot of things,” he said. “I think right now, it didn’t end the way any of them thought or maybe wanted. There was upset at the show, at Peter, at Madison. I think the only one unscathed was Hannah Ann.”

Did Peter Weber’s mom, Barb, know she was being filmed during the taped finale?

Much of Bachelor Nation paid special notice to the “Barb cam” during the finale. THR asked Mills if the pilot’s mother knew her reactions were being recorded.

“You can’t miss seeing that there’s a camera right there in front of you. You certainly know you are on camera. Do I think she knew there was a ‘Barb cam’ where viewers saw the picture-in-picture? Probably not,” he said.

But Mills pegs Barbara as an authentic woman and guesses she would have acted the same whether she knew a camera was on her or not.

“I met her and she’s a nice and good person. And I think that her emotions would have been real regardless of whether the camera was there. You saw her at the end of the show with [Bachelorette] Clare [Crawley] wishing her well and hugging her. I don’t think that her reactions would have been any different had she known there was a camera cutting to her,” he said.

Read more: ‘The Bachelor’: Peter Weber’s Brother Jack Is Dragging Madison Prewett on Instagram