ABC has announced that it’ll soon be airing a discussion show spinoff of its Bachelor spinoff Bachelor In Paradise, as part of an experiment in Bachelor spinoff recursion, presumably with an eye toward creating a Bachelor-only universe, in which everyone is a “personal trainer” or an “entrepreneur,” and all human interactions are either rose or hot tub-based. The discussion show, After Paradise, will be hosted by Bachelor star Chris Harrison, who’s presided for more than a decade over ABC’s blood-drenched arena of broken hearts, shattered dreams, and occasional charming Amy Schumer appearances. Harrison will be joined by Jenny Mollen, who proved her romantic bona fides by breaking down the brooding walls around David Boreanaz’s tender heart on the final season of Angel.
The hour-long discussion show will air immediately after Bachelor In Paradise, a show where contestants exiled from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are given a shot at romantic redemption by enacting a flirtation-based version of The Lord Of The Flies. (That is, they’re forced to mingle with each other in a tropical-island-set elimination competition that’s kind of like Survivor, but without all the interesting parts where it looks like someone might starve.) The show will begin airing its second season on August 3, with the follow-up program finally addressing complaints that the first was insufficiently inward-looking or obsessed with its own media-facing portrayal of romantic inevitability. Harrison and Mollen will be joined every week by cast members and celebrity fans, eager to dissect all the plot twists and turns of the previous hour’s events, analyzing the clues and ciphers hidden around the island to finally solve the mystery of why Debra can’t see that Jeremy is the “former investment banker” for her.
After Paradise is a production of Embassy Row, the company behind AMC’s Talking Dead, which popularized the “you watched it, let’s talk about it” format of chat show, and Watch What Happens: Live, which similarly gives the live chat show treatment to reality TV happenings, providing a virtual water cooler for people to hang around while they come down from watching “retired bartender” Todd get romantically rejected, or devoured by a zombie, whichever comes first.