Early in his debut as The Bachelor’s next leading man, Grant Ellis made a bold declaration: “I’m financially stable. I’m emotionally stable. I’m physically stable. I’m just missing my person.” That foundation should be a given for any reality series that wants to responsibly cast its romantic leads—yet ABC’s hit dating show has a rich history of hoisting contestants with problematic pasts into the public sphere.
As a rule, taking things for granted is a surefire way to grow stale or complacent. But Monday’s Bachelor premiere wisely leans into the familiar beats of a generic Bachelor season, and the refreshing nature of Ellis, a 30-year-old day trader from Houston who became the franchise’s second-ever Black male lead after the 2020 selection of Matt James. (In an awkward bit of timing, James just recently split from his season’s winner, Rachael Kirkconnell, who elected to tell her side of the breakup on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast.)
After his time as an affable but largely underexposed contestant on Jenn Tran’s Bachelorette season, Ellis enters his own love story as something of a blank slate. He’s a former professional basketball player whose career was cut short by injury. Ellis’s outlook on life and love has been informed by his parents’ divorce and father’s longtime recovery from addiction. In opening remarks to his 25 suitors, Ellis shares that he admires a woman’s strength and intuition because of his mother, who signed him up for the show.
While meeting his crop of refreshingly age-appropriate contestants—there’s no one under the age of 25, folks!—Ellis strikes a delicate balance. He appears confident and at ease in this role, happy to wear an unflattering wig while taking selfies with Bailey, a social media manager from Atlanta or watching a Powerpoint presentation from Michigan-based pediatric behavior analyst Parisa that includes AI-generated photos of their future offspring. But at no point does Ellis’s smoothness feel suspicious, even when his ability to quote The Notebook leads to his first kiss of the season—with Allyshia, an interior designer from Tampa. “I have to say, I don’t kiss on the first date,” she naturally declared to her fellow contestants moments before doing just that.
Actually, Ellis locked lips with seven women. He kissed Juliana, who entered the mansion with a cannoli in honor of her Italian roots; Litia, a Salt Lake City resident with hopes of becoming a Mormon wife; Vicky, a Las Vegas bottle girl; Zoe, a tech engineer/model; and Rose, who did her smooching while blindfolded. Then there was Alexe, a Canadian pediatric speech therapist whose limo entrance involved a “no drama Ilama” named Linda. She secured the coveted first impression rose and, in a twist that should’ve been deployed about four seasons ago, also nabbed the season’s first one-on-one date next week.
Alexe’s early advantage was the only bit of drama to find during Ellis’s Bachelor debut. Most of the ladies exuded the same aw-shucks energy one expects to see in a premiere episode, devoting their screen time to light jabs about the attractiveness of their competitors and premature assurances that Ellis is their husband-in-waiting. Even the late arrival of a mystery woman yields little suspense: it’s only Ellis’s older sister Taylor, who briefly joins the merriment to show some baby photos of her brother, reveal that he was in a seven-year on-and-off relationship, and reiterate his overall authenticity.
It was a sleepy start, but maybe after 29 seasons, The Bachelor has earned the right to take our investment for granted. After all, Tran’s season of The Bachelorette began as a slow burn before erupting into an all-out dumpster fire by the finale’s end. A trailer for Ellis’s season promises that the juiciest stuff is yet to come. In between tears and trips abroad, Ellis says he is eager to shed his “lone wolf mentality,” represented by the literal lone wolf tattoo on his forearm. And later in his love story, Ellis appears to be genuinely torn over his final rose recipient, with host Jesse Palmer prodding him to make an eleventh-hour decision. It all suggests that perhaps even Ellis’s stability can be shaken.
