ABC Peter Weber meets the contestants on Season 24 of The Bachelor.

ABC Rachel Lindsay, the Season 13 Bachelorette.

For at least a decade there have been claims that the Bachelor franchise has jumped the shark. Old-school scripted melodramas — like soaps — could count on an endless supply of surprise deaths and season-climax marriages and breakups to keep viewers hooked. But reality shows like The Bachelor can’t exactly kill people off (though it loves dramatic accidents) and a marriage plot is already the point.

So pretty early on, the show started playing with the formula — editing in, for instance, how the contestants’ real lives were supposedly impacting their being on the show. In 2009, during Jillian Harris’s Bachelorette season, contestant Ed Swiderski quit the show for his job (!) only to return and become Harris’s final pick. During the following Bachelor season, Ali Fedotowsky did the same. Host Chris Harrison pushed back against fans’ complaints that Fedotowsky “pulled an Ed,” telling TV Guide that the exits were not “tricks” but “a sign of the times and how important a job is.” Thus, the show was able to update the brand with a new trope while hewing to its narrative of romance and the stumbling blocks thereof. But as other streaming-era dating shows have become less white and have updated themselves for the era of online dating, the Bachelor attempted to evolve again. And reality has started intruding into the rose universe in a less brand-friendly way. In 2017, Rachel Lindsay was announced as the first black Bachelorette. There were many ways the show could have framed the season — for instance, as a way of opening up discussions around interracial dating. Instead, producers turned contestant Lee Garrett’s racism and his fights with fellow contestant Kenny King into just another entertaining storyline. The show made Lindsay herself confront Garrett, as if it were her responsibility to be both the show’s multicultural window dressing and its moral arbiter.

Reality has started intruding into the rose universe in a less brand-friendly way.

View this photo on Instagram Instagram: @missncusa Hannah Brown (left) and Caelynn Miller-Keyes, two former Miss USA contestants who competed on Season 23 of The Bachelor.

The Bachelor has always been more about the drama between its women contestants than about the search for Mr. Right. Bringing together complete strangers and locking them in a house while they date the same man is a breeding ground for heightened and highly editable emotions. And for years the “organic” drama of that scenario seemed to be enough to keep viewers tuning in. But the dramatic strategy has recently pivoted into tropes familiar to any viewer of Real Housewives: bringing in women who have histories outside of the show.

Last year, during Underwood’s season, the show upped the drama quotient by featuring two Miss USA 2018 contestants: Hannah Brown from Alabama and Caelynn Miller-Keyes from North Carolina. It’s not odd that two women from the same industry were cast; after all, there are so many personal trainers on The Bachelorette that they’ve been rebranded as “entrepreneurs.” But the preexisting rivalry between Brown and Miller-Keyes was brought into the season’s arc by design, and their competing "she said, she said" accounts about their time on the pageant became one of the biggest storylines. The truth about the feud was never established on the show. Miller-Keyes was eventually eliminated (and went on to find lower-key love on Bachelor in Paradise), while Brown’s journey — about learning to grow out of her too-perfect pageant demeanor — helped give her a storyline as the protagonist on the following season of The Bachelorette. This strategy of manufacturing intrigue was evidently deemed so successful for the show that this season of The Bachelor, two former pageant participants were once again cast to compete for Peter Weber’s affections: Alayah Benavidez (Miss Texas 2019) and Victoria Paul (Miss Louisiana 2019). In one episode, Paul revealed to Weber that Benavidez had asked her to “lie” about knowing her from before. These dramatic histories add extraneous controversy but nothing else to the arc of the show. Because the castmates on a show like Real Housewives coexist and interact through multiple seasons, their relationships and alliances get fleshed out in a deeper way, and there is a balance between cycles of friendship and conflict. On The Bachelor, it just flattens most of the show’s drama into petty conflict.

The show is now less cringey for its romantic entanglements than for the way it keeps exposing the humiliations required to exist in the reality television–dominated entertainment industry.

In recent seasons, like many aging and successful reality TV franchises, The Bachelor has started letting cast members acknowledge they’re on a television show and that they understand its mechanics. Real Housewives once again provides a good counter-model of how this can work. Because the women there are depicted in a variety of contexts — their families, their workplaces, and promoting their brands and products on the show — letting down the fourth wall has added to the viewers’ understanding of the women’s motivations and characterizations. The infamous blowout between Bethenny Frankel and Jill Zarin on Season 3 of Real Housewives of New York became a lot clearer for viewers when the women acknowledged during the reunion how their actions on camera started to be shaped by being on the show. In contrast, because The Bachelor is not about its contestants’ lives in general, this shift has mostly just allowed them to be more specific in how they accuse each other of not being there “for the right reasons” — like claiming someone is angling to be the next Bachelorette or to promote an Instagram career. “It really makes me sick that people like you come in here trying to brand themselves, and all you’re looking for is just a hashtag,” one contestant this season told another (a fashion blogger), who retorted: “Watch this over and see who you really are, honey; I’m not the villain of the season, honey.” Watching the contestants volley back and forth about the show as a branding opportunity is almost unpleasantly real — a not-very-romantic reminder of the women’s lack of agency and the ruthlessness of the digital attention economy. In fact, perhaps the most shocking moment of this season so far came when — for the first time — the musical guest was involved in the drama. As contestant Victoria Fuller (the same one caught in the racism controversy) was on a date with Weber, the show surprised them, as it usually does, with a musical serenade — in this case provided by country music performer Chase Rice. But it turned out Fuller had previously dated him, and viewers were treated to her tearfully wondering why he had been brought on the show. (In his words, they had briefly “hung out.”) Their chat, initially away from Weber’s eyes, created some of the most awkward reality television ever, not because of anything they discussed but because it was bonkers to see a musical guest — who just needed the exposure — subjected to the Bachelor’s drama vortex. The show is now less cringey for its romantic entanglements than for the way it keeps exposing the humiliations required to exist in the reality television–dominated entertainment industry.

Francisco Roman / ABC Weber on a date with Victoria Fuller in Santiago, Chile, on this season of The Bachelor.