There’s a reason ABC calls its postseason Bachelor special After The Final Rose: Everyone wants to know how full of crap the people on the show really were. Were the contestants just pretending to be nice? Were they all merely blindsided and emotionally tricked by the exhausting process of having cameras on them nonstop for so long? Do the Bachelor and his chosen fiancée secretly hate each other? (Honestly, you’ve got about 50-50 odds on that last one, if history is any indication.) So when the long-running series finds a match that seems to stick, they milk the hell out of it. Which is what’s happening this year: Deadline reports sister network Freeform has greenlit the spinoff series Ben And Lauren: Happily Ever After, starring the couple who found televised love on the previous season. It’s been six whole months, after all, which is roughly “ever after” in Hollywood time.
The new show about Ben and Laura enjoying true love and definitely not fame will follow the couple as they plan a wedding and begin life after the show, apparently by immediately doing another show. It’s reported “Ben will explore getting involved in the political realm and Lauren will try and establish her identity post-Bachelor,” which is a presumably a way of saying he registers to vote and she goes through an existential crisis, reading Sartre and smoking all day long.
Actually, given the heavy-handed role devout Christianity seems to play in their lives, it wouldn’t shock us if this story took an unsettling turn toward the pious, possibly as a way to evade the fact that what Freeform exec VP Karey Burke calls “the biggest Bachelor couple of the last 10 years” began with Ben telling two women he loved them, then informing one of them, “J/K lol right? See ya.” No word on when the new show will air, but possibly right before another spinoff series where all the women who didn’t end up with the Bachelor watch Ben and Lauren’s show and roll their eyes so hard they end up in the ER.