"Bachelorette" season 19 finale: I need a shower

Does anyone feel good coming away from that dumpster fire of an ending?

I’m writing this on Thursday, nearly 48 hours after the season finale of “The Bachelorette.” I needed a few days to decompress and collect my thoughts, and for the stink of the cursed ritual of destroying people’s lives for entertainment to wear off.

This was the second season in a row where I walked away not only unsatisfied, but also feeling a bit … icky. Seriously, I felt like I needed a shower. Between the season-long vilification of Rachel Recchia, the endless pitting of the two Bachelorettes against each other, the lack of acknowledgement of Erich Schwer’s blackface scandal, the crucification of Tino Franco and the truly devastating reporting from the Los Angeles Times on DeMario Jackson that came out just before finale part two started, I was feeling pretty complicit as a member of Bachelor Nation.

That said, I’ve had some time to think (and shower) since Tuesday. Here are, in no particular order, some of my takeaways from the finale of season 19, the first — and hopefully last — full season with two leads.

The show wanted a love story, and that’s how Erich escaped.

Erich Schwer, the man who received Gabby Windey’s final rose on Tuesday, has been embroiled in two scandals for weeks: one surrounding a photo of him in blackface in his high school yearbook and another involving a woman he left behind to go on the show.

Many “Bachelorette” suitors have walked in Erich’s shoes. Season 15 ringwinner Jed Wyatt had an actual girlfriend who said he loved before he appeared on — and won — Hannah Brown’s season. Garrett Yrigoyen, the ringwinner of season 14, was outed for liking racist, transphobic and just outright cruel memes on Instagram as his season was airing. The history of scandals in Bachelor Nation is long and storied, especially when it comes to racism.

But Schwer not only got away without having to answer for the picture of him in blackface, he also got a hero’s edit and a touching hot seat with his new fiancé. Only the texts with the girl back home were addressed, and that was in the second segment, after several minutes of letting the audience “ooh” and “aah” over how cute he and Gabby are.

Erich did apologize for the blackface in an Instagram post. Whether that’s sufficient is not for me to say. But for the show, this was a moment to prove a commitment to diversity and anti-racism, a pledge the franchise made two years ago during the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. Instead, they went the typical “Bachelor” route and pretended like it didn’t happen.

Racism on “The Bachelor” franchise is either ignored or used as a plot point for “drama,” like with Lee Garrett on Rachel Lindsay’s season 13, or with Andrew Poole on Andi Dorfman’s season 10. It’s unacceptable, and it’s an active choice the show is making.

Once again, the franchise failed to address racism, and its failure to acknowledge any part of the Schwer blackface scandal was shameful.

Please listen to Michelle Young and Becca Kufrin discuss their disappointment about the franchise’s choice not to address it in the latest episode of the “Bachelor Happy Hour” podcast. The discussion starts just before the 52 minute mark.

The vilification of Rachel Recchia

I’ll admit I took Rachel’s villain edit a bit too personally this year. I found myself defending her in a Facebook group full of Karens — where she was getting called all kinds of horrible things — and on Twitter and Instagram. It was upsetting me so much that I realized it was time for me to enforce some stronger personal boundaries.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the show clearly made Rachel the unlikable one of the two bachelorettes. Gabby was the funny, free-spirited, emotionally mature goofball and Rachel was the sobbing, insecure, vague spoiled brat who only cared about getting engaged.

I was shocked at how many people seemed to buy into what the show was turning her into and how quick the public was to make judgments about who she actually is.

Some common criticisms included: why she was so upset about getting rejected by three guys at a rose ceremony when she had guys she actually liked, why did she get so upset when she found out Aven didn’t want to propose, why did she **allegedly** act different once the cameras were off during Zach’s fantasy suite, why did she cancel the group date in Bruges after Logan switched sides and why is the whole situation with her and Tino so weird?

All of these questions — except the last one — have pretty simple answers. She was upset about the rose ceremony rejections — I think — because no bachelorette has EVER been rejected time and time again at a rose ceremony before and it is humiliating. She was upset about Aven because it sounds like he did say earlier that he would propose, and also it’s the expectation of the show, and also, again, every single bachelorette has been proposed to and it was validating her fears of being undesirable.

With Zach, I’m guessing she knew she didn’t want to pick him but producers either highly pressured or even forced her to do three fantasy suites. Same thing with the Bruges group date. Do we all really believe it was her decision to cancel and hers alone?

People are tearing Rachel apart even after the finale, when it was revealed that Tino cheated on her. That blows my mind. The woman was cheated on, yet she’s still the awful one. Okay. Which brings me to…

The sacrifice of Tino Franco for our joy and entertainment

Look, Tino is no angel. No matter what happened between him and Rachel after filming and before their breakup, the bottom line is, he kissed another woman while still engaged. That is wrong. He also probably should just have apologized for what he did, instead of make excuses for it, and try to make Rachel look bad with the written lines he brought in his little black book to their safe house visit.

But man, no one in the world deserves what the show put him through in his last few moments on screen.

Tino and Rachel were in the middle of a contentious hot seat on live television when Jesse Palmer said there was someone backstage who was “dying” to see Rachel. Enter Aven, who came out to ask Rachel to catch up only to realize — to his horror — that Tino was still out there too. That was just wrong. Wrong for Tino and even wrong for Aven and Rachel, because a nice moment between the two of them was really all about making Tino look horrible.

The producers of the show literally skewered Tino. They kept this man on stage during Aven’s knight in shining armor moment to humiliate and crush him. They wanted Tino to feel pain, and they wanted the crowd to laugh at his misery.

All I can say is I hope Tino has a strong support system of friends and family around him, and of mental health professionals, if that’s something he needs right now. Public humiliation like that is never okay.

Bachelor choices continue to be insulting

Here is a brief list of people I would have preferred as the next Bachelor over Zach Shallcross:

Peter Kraus. Tyler Cameron. Blake Moynes. Aven Jones. Andrew Spencer. Ethan Kang. Justin Glaze. Greg Grippo. Tyler Norris. Brandon Jones. Nayte Olukoya. Nate Mitchell. Shawn Booth. Dale Moss. Zac Clark. Ben Smith.

That’s pretty much everybody who has been in the top four in the past four or five seasons of “The Bachelorette.”

Shallcross seems like a nice enough guy, but he lacks the presence, charisma and gravitas of a Sean Lowe or a Ben Higgins. I believe that is intentional. “The Bachelor” is no longer the most desirable man in America, a guy with great credentials and and even better smile, someone any woman would kill to be with. No, these days the only thing they look for in a lead is malleability.

All you need to be the next “Bachelor” is a willingness to play ball, and a lot of the guys they pick don’t seem to realize that’s why. Take Clayton Echard, for example. I bet he had a nice enough experience on Michelle Young’s season, made friends with some producers, and thought being “The Bachelor” would be amazing.

I bet Peter Weber had a blast on Hannah Brown’s season, especially after getting praised as a sexual stallion after it became publicly known that they had sex four times in a windmill. But they both learned, quickly enough, that producers are not your friends, to dire results. The same thing happened to Matt James, who had never been on a “Bachelor” show before he was the lead — but that’s a whole other cornucopia of racist mess.

Those three are the only Bachelors in the post-Elan Gale era, and each one of them got completely destroyed in one way or another. Unfortunately, the same thing will happen to Shallcross. He will trust the producers, he will do most things they say, and they will break him emotionally. Clayton’s “I’m so broken” times 20. I’m not hoping for it, but I know it will happen.

Sean Lowe may have been at the finale, but the days of love stories like his and Catherine’s are long gone.

Those are my main takeaways from the finale. Before I go, however, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some serious news out of Bachelor Nation, this one by way of the Los Angeles Times. Here’s your trigger warning before you decide to read any further — this story deals with a very sensitive topic.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles Times entertainment writer Amy Kaufman reported that DeMario Jackson, a former “Bachelorette” contestant who was at the center of a scandal that led to a temporary shutdown of season four of “Bachelor in Paradise,” has been accused of raping two women.

I won’t get into the details here. If you’re interested, you can read Kaufman’s story, which I suggest you do (it’s linked above). But let’s just say what Jackson is accused of doing is absolutely disgusting, and the allegations are extremely credible. One of the women even went so far as to FaceTime Jackson with LAPD detectives on the call to get him to admit what happened, which he apparently did — but no prosecution has taken place. (By the way, DeMario has since responded to the allegations. Check it out here on TMZ).

On season four of “Paradise,” production was shut down after a crew member reported a sexual situation between DeMario and contestant Corinne Olympios that appeared to not be consensual. The encounter was reported and production was shut down until the situation was “investigated.” The cast came back later on — sans Corinne and DeMario — once the investigation concluded, and the second go at filming began with a conversation between then-host Chris Harrison and the cast.

The consensus seemed to be that nothing happened, that DeMario was a good guy, that he had never done anything to the other women there and that everything was fine. Nothing to see here!

Corinne, who was apparently mixing medication with alcohol at the time of the incident, seemed to have no memory of it, and by the time the season finale rolled around, she was at the reunion, sitting next to DeMario, and saying that everything was fine, and that the “cloud” over the two of them had been “cleared,” in her own words.

With these new allegations, it certainly brings up questions about the level of responsibility the franchise has. Did they truly investigate the “Paradise” incident? By pushing it under the rug, are they in some way responsible for what eventually happened to these two women? When is the “Bachelor” franchise going to accept its responsibility as not just a dumb reality show but an actual machine that can impact real people’s lives?

I’ll be following this DeMario story as it continues to unfold. But with that, plus the utter despicability of the finale, I feel like I’m once again at a crossroads as a fan of this show. To be a fan of this show is to be complicit.

With that said … what a great time to start a “Bachelor” Substack!!

If you’re still here at the bottom of this long story, hello! This is my first post in The Gospel of the Bachelor. Welcome to it. It feels weird to go from talking about a trash fire finale and awful allegations towards a former contestant to writing about the show, but here I am.

This show, for better or for worse (probably for worse), runs through my veins. I want to relive the glory days, explore new eras, take part in the larger discourse and take a good, hard look at how the franchise reflects society as a whole.

Thanks for joining me for this one, and stay tuned, because next week is … drumroll … PARADISE WEEK!!!!