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Fans Are Not Happy About The Rumored Next Bachelor

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Bachelor Nation is not taking the leak well.

On Wednesday, August 29, 2018, reality TV blogger Steve Carbone — better known by his alter ego “Reality Steve” — dropped the kind of spoiler that sends an entire fanbase into open revolt. Barring a last-second switch, he reported, ABC’s next Bachelor would be Colton Underwood, the 26-year-old former pro football player who finished fourth on Becca Kufrin’s season of “The Bachelorette.” The reaction online was immediate, and it was not kind.

• Reality Steve reported on August 29, 2018 that Colton Underwood had locked up the Season 23 Bachelor role barring an unexpected switch.
• Underwood finished fourth on Becca Kufrin’s Season 14 “Bachelorette” and later appeared on Season 5 of “Bachelor in Paradise,” where his relationship with Tia Booth turned messy on-camera.
• Fans criticized the pick for skipping other Kufrin-season favorites like Jason Tartick and Blake Horstmann and for extending the franchise’s history of never casting a Black Bachelor.

The Reality Steve Report

Carbone has built his entire brand on getting ahead of ABC’s own casting announcements, and this one landed with the usual precision. His reporting framed Underwood’s selection as all but locked, a detail that mattered because it meant the backlash started brewing well before the network had said a single official word. That gap — spoiler out, confirmation pending — is exactly the window Bachelor Nation used to make its objections loud.

Barring a last-second switcheroo, that man will be none other than Colton Underwood.

Causes Behind Fan Rebellion

The case against Underwood centered on his run through Kufrin’s season, where his on-and-off entanglement with fellow contestant Tia Booth played out as one of the messier storylines of the year. Viewers argued he came across as emotionally immature and more interested in extending his reality TV profile than in actually settling down. That skepticism followed him straight into the rumor cycle, with critics questioning whether he was truly ready to lead a season built around finding a spouse.

Layered on top of that was simple frustration over who got passed over. Fans pointed to Jason Tartick and Blake Horstmann — both from Kufrin’s cast — as more grounded, better-liked alternatives. It’s the kind of casting complaint that echoes across reality TV generally, the same dynamic that shows up whenever reality stars clash with their own co-stars on camera and audiences start picking sides for the next season.

The Diversity Question

A separate strand of the backlash targeted franchise leadership directly, including creator Mike Fleiss. Critics noted that “The Bachelor” had, at that point, never once handed the lead role to a Black man across more than two decades on the air. Underwood’s rumored casting became a flashpoint for that broader complaint, with fans arguing the franchise kept defaulting to the same type of contestant instead of using the platform to widen who gets to be the romantic lead.

The Virginity Storyline

Underwood was also set to be the first Bachelor whose season would be built, at least in part, around his public disclosure that he was a virgin — a detail that had already followed him through Kufrin’s season and “Bachelor in Paradise.” Fans worried out loud that producers would lean on it as a marketing hook rather than treat it as a footnote, turning a personal detail into the season’s dominant gimmick before a single episode had aired.

That worry fed into the same fatigue driving the Tartick and Horstmann chatter — a sense that the show was choosing spectacle over substance, the kind of pattern that has fueled plenty of online blowback whenever reality romances curdle into public feuds the following season.

As of that Wednesday report, ABC still hadn’t confirmed a thing, and Reality Steve’s own reporting left the door open — barely — for a switch before the network made it official. Bachelor Nation spent the days that followed hoping producers would walk it back. They didn’t get their wish.