“Bachelorette” Jenn Tran on identity, family and the search for love
Jenn Tran, the first Asian-American lead actress on the reality series “The Bachelorette,” talks about her identity and the search for a relationship.
Does reality TV exist for “the right reasons”?
That’s what fans of the format are asking themselves after the recent heartbreak involving a leading actress on “The Bachelorette,” the popular spinoff of the ABC series “Bachelor,” in which a woman plays the lead role. It’s a familiar scene: The leading actress’ season-long search for love with a male admirer who is supposedly there for “the right reasons” ends in total disaster.
Last night, Jenn Tran sat onstage with host Jesse Palmer during the season’s “After the Final Rose” and sobbed in front of the studio audience as viewers watched her relive the way her final choice, Devin Strader, dumped her. He called off the engagement during a 15-minute phone call last month as the season aired.
It was a tough end to a picture-perfect season for the franchise’s first Asian-American leading lady and the first woman to propose to her last husband.
Watching women get their hearts broken on Monday night sports has become its own cultural sensation – just like Monday Night Football. So why do we continue to fail them on reality TV?
More: The Bachelorette finale reveals Jenn Tran’s final choice – and how it all went wrong
Couples from the reality show “The Bachelorette” rarely stay together
The fact is: The seasons of “Bachelorette” and “Bachelor” rarely end with a happy ending.
In fact, only two of the final fifteen couples from the Bachelorette finale are still together today: JoJo Fletcher, the leading lady of season 12, who married football commentator Jordan Rodgers, and Charity Lawson, the leading lady of last season and former Dancing with the Stars star, who gave her final rose to Dotun Olubeko.
Fletcher and Rogers, also the brother of NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers, got engaged in 2016 during season 12 of the show and married in Santa Ynez, California, in 2022. Meanwhile, Lawson and Olubeko said they plan to marry in 2025.
Every season finale is the best most dramatic of all time – and many end the same.
In 2018, race car driver Arie Luyendyk split from his fiancée Becca Kufrin on camera as his season ended on The Bachelor, and later pursued runner-up Lauren Burnham. The couple married in Hawaii the following year and are now traveling the world with their three children.
Kufrin also found love of her own and married Thomas Jacobs in 2023, who experienced a storm of outrage on social media as a suitor on Katie Thurston’s “Bachelorette” season before meeting Kufrin on “Bachelor in Paradise.” The two are engaged and had a baby boy last September.
Then it happened again.
In one of the franchise’s most talked-about seasons, former Miss Alabama Hannah Brown made big headlines in 2019 after a dramatic season ended with a shock: Her final favorite, aspiring singer Jed Wyatt, faced allegations that he had a steady girlfriend immediately before filming the ABC reality competition show.
Rumor had it that he was planning to get back together with her after filming was finished. Brown and Wyatt clashed during “After The Final Rose.”
In July, Wyatt married fitness trainer Ellen Decker and Brown got engaged to non-reality TV personality Adam Woolard in August 2023.
And now Bachelor Nation’s newest victim: Jenn.
Hannah Brown tells of a hurricane after “Bachelorette”: “I have problems”
Social media users criticize the producers of “Bachelorette” for displaying Jenn Tran’s pain
After the season finale, social media users harshly criticized the producers in a public forum for inflicting pain on Tran.
“There is nothing entertaining about watching someone in such insurmountable pain that they are almost gasping for air,” one user wrote in their notes app, sharing the screenshot with X. “And there is nothing cute or funny about making them, at the height of that pain, rewatch the day they just described as the worst of their lives in front of a live studio audience and next to the person responsible for that pain.”
Another user said, “Cancel the whole show for doing this to her… how are you going to get her to watch the proposal after THAT whole conversation?”
Even the star of the 20th season of “The Bachelor”, Ben Higgins, criticized the production for subjecting Tran to trauma.
“Jenn should have stood up in the middle of the invitational party and given everyone the peace sign,” he wrote. “She would have walked out of the studio and never turned back. It was absolutely cruel and unnecessary to make her watch this again. I can’t believe it.”
Jenn Tran, Joey Graziadei: These are the participants of the 33rd season of “Dancing With the Stars”
So we ask again: Does reality TV exist for the “right reasons”?
When you’re 26, Tran’s age, everything feels permanent and fleeting at the same time. You feel eternally young and at the same time like time is running out – especially for some when it comes to finding true love.
Your heart gets broken. By a partner, by people who have power over you, by someone you thought would be a part of your life forever. Or by someone (like Devin) who tells you, “I disappointed you, but everything I felt for you was real.”
We’ve all had moments like that. But many of us don’t have to face the other person in front of the whole world. The tears we cry are reserved for our private moments – not for millions of people watching from their couches at home.
It is “part of the role”. But when will it to really? And why does “The Bachelorette” reserve these moments for women?
Tran’s story isn’t over yet. Like most former members of the Bachelor franchise, she will be joining the cast of Dancing with the Stars Season 33 alongside her ex-boyfriend and Bachelor Joey Graziadei.
And maybe this time their story will have a happy ending.
Contributors: Kinsey Crowley, KiMi Robinson
