Prefatory note: Friends, the travelogue is taking a slight break this week.

I remember the first season of ABC’s reality TV juggernaut “The Bachelor” somewhat vaguely. As I recall the lead was a single guy from a fairly large tire magnate family. The premise of the show was vulgar, but it made sense: this was a guy twenty women would arguably throw themselves at in real life.

Fast forward to last week and the show’s gone from THAT to…well…having twenty men compete for the love of a single mother of three with multiple baby daddies and a guilty plea for domestic violence.

Yeah. You say “the Bachelorette,” ABC. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

How did we get here? Simple, friends. It’s the oldest buzzword in the book for television: SYNERGY!

Taylor Frankie Paul is one of the stars of the hottest show on Hulu right now, “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” I’ve been forced to be in the room when this show was on and as best I can tell it’s the story of a group of Utah moms who got famous for doing dances on TikTok. And engaging in “soft swinging.” And numerous other instances of behaving badly.

The center of this show was Ms. Paul, a woman with two kids from a previous marriage and a third by toxic, perpetually clueless baby daddy Dakota Mortensen. By Paul’s own admission, the two are not good for each other—they basically fight and have sex nonstop. In fact, the very first season of “The Secret Lives Of Mormon Wives” references a domestic assault situation involving Paul and Mortensen from 2023.

Somehow, after two really bad seasons of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” in terms of viewership, they decided this woman was the right pick to go to LA and date twenty men on camera in an attempt to find love.

All of that went up in flames last week when TMZ released video leaked to them of the 2023 fight between Paul and Mortensen. If you’ve not seen it don’t bother. It’s ugly, and there’s a kid present in the video which makes it all the more despicable.

Within two hours, “The Bachelorette” was canceled for the entire season. The website is dark, billboards that were put up in Times Square hastily came down, and ABC released a statement about how NOW that the video had come out there was no way they could continue with this season of “The Bachelorette.” The best thing to do right now was to focus on the safety of Paul’s family, according to ABC’s reps.

Yeah, ABC. I’m calling bullshit. The only reason you pulled the damn season was because the DV videos finally surfaced. Videos you can’t tell me you didn’t know about because your pals at Hulu knew and referenced the incident for the inaugural season of their smash hit.

Plus with all the background checks and vetting reality TV show contestants have to do these days, it’s impossible for me to believe ABC’s executives and the show runners had zero idea this video was out in the wild somewhere waiting to escape.

Paul’s season was unsuccessful before it began. Not because the producers and staff weren’t interested in trying to make lemonade out of lemons, but because this lemon never should’ve been allowed near the “Bachelor nation” franchises in the first place. And it will surprise exactly no one that the final rose wilted somewhere in Utah, with Ms. Paul ending her made-for-TV engagement in order to continue seeing her most recent toxic baby daddy.

Hopefully this is it for the series as a whole as well. Shows like “The Bachelorette” lean into the glamorizing the most shame-worthy parts of modern dating and subconsciously reinforce that the excesses we see scripted and filmed for television are what we’re supposed to strive for in real life. It’s literally faker than World Wrestling Entertainment’s TV product and yet for decades we’re led to believe this is a legitimate way to find love, American style.

I wish the best for Ms. Paul and hope her upcoming custody battles fall in her favor. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s just rare when those mistakes cost a network millions and maybe tank two huge television shows in the process.

See y’all next week for another travelogue. I feel like I need mouthwash.