The vetting that wasn’t
I keep coming back to the vetting. Hours of psychological evaluation. Behavioral assessments. Detailed interviews about family, relationships, personal history. This is what a former contestant described — the process ABC puts every person through before they appear on camera.
They knew. Not just about the arrest — about the guilty plea, the child present during the incident, the ongoing investigation with Dakota Mortensen. They knew, and they built a premiere around her anyway, because the chaos was the point. The chaos was always the point.
Who bears the cost
A post-production staff gets laid off. Paul releases a statement about silently suffering extensive mental and physical abuse.
Mortensen’s life is dissected by TMZ. A child who was present during the 2023 incident will someday Google their parent’s name and find all of this.
Reality television has a body count that never gets tallied in the trades. Love Island alone — Sophie Gradon, Mike Thalassitis, Caroline Flack. The genre’s entire business model depends on finding people whose boundary between private and public is already compromised, and then erasing whatever remains of it.
We’re not anti-entertainment. We’re asking who signs the consent form for the collateral damage.
Where we concede ground: Adults chose to participate. We can’t protect people from their own decisions forever.
What would change our mind: Enforceable industry-wide duty-of-care standards with independent oversight, not network self-regulation.
Read the full synthesis: The Bachelor got cancelled… what does it say about us?