‘The Bachelor’ Producer Worried the Virtual Rose Ceremony Would Look ‘Embarrassing’
The Bachelor Season 27 featured the show’s first virtual rose ceremony. After the lead, Zach Shallcross caught coronavirus (Covid-19), producers were forced to improvise to figure out how the show would go on. It wasn’t as easy as just waiting until Zach was out of quarantine. While the virtual rose ceremony helped moved the show to the next week, producers had concerns about how it would look.
[WARNING: This article contains spoilers for The Bachelor 2023 Week 5.]
Production couldn’t wait for Zach to recover from coronavirus
Things took a turn in London for The Bachelor Season 27. Zach was feeling under the weather, which caused him to miss both the group date and the after-party. Host Jesse Palmer then announced that Zach tested positive for coronavirus and would have to miss his 1-on-1 date with Charity as well.
Zach was facing at least 5 days in isolation, and producers couldn’t wait around for him to get better. “We were locked into a production calendar. We know exactly where we’re traveling and when we’re traveling,” The Bachelor producer Bennett Graebner explained to Entertainment Weekly.
“The next location, we have it booked — we’re showing up on this day, we have this many rooms at this hotel. And the same is true for where we are in London,” Graebner continued.
“So, it’s not as simple as like, ‘Oh, we’ll just wait it out, and we’ll continue to shoot.’ We somehow have to get to the next location, or we’re going to find ourselves in a lot of trouble when it comes to our bookings. That was part of the struggle.”
‘The Bachelor’ producer worried about how the virtual rose ceremony would look
Producers settled on a solution. The Bachelor hosted the first-ever virtual rose ceremony. During the cocktail party portion of the evening, Zach chatted with the women individually via iPad. At the rose ceremony, he selected the remaining nine women while speaking from a wall-mounted TV monitor.
According to Graebner, the idea for The Bachelor to put on a virtual rose ceremony came from Disney/ABC executive Rob Mills. “In full disclosure, I thought it was a bad idea,” Graebner told EW.
“I told him. I said, ‘I really don’t think this is a good idea.’ He said, ‘Why? What are you so worried about?’ What I was worried about was that here we are two-and-a-half years into a pandemic, where people are just so fatigued by looking at people interacting on screens.”
“I was also concerned that when we put it together, it just wouldn’t look like The Bachelor,” the producer added. “It wouldn’t look like the production that we know and love. To be frank, I thought it might look embarrassing. I remember telling Rob that, and he said, ‘Well, let’s give it a shot.'”
Director Dave Miller thought up an SNL version of the rose ceremony
The Bachelor crew also had some silly ideas for how to make the virtual rose ceremony happen. “Trust me, my sense of humor, I would love to have made the SNL version, a hundred percent,” director Dave Miller told EW. “I would’ve had [stage manager] Paulie Danner wheel Zach in with his face on the monitor.”
“All the goofy ideas came out of me, and I got the giggles out,” he continued. “Then we moved on to, what is not going to be silly? And that was just putting the monitor there and having a black screen.”
New episodes of The Bachelor Season 27 air Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
