The Bachelor senior citizen spinoff is still happening–eventually!

The Bachelor senior citizen spinoff will happen–eventually!

The Bachelor senior citizen spinoff took a backseat after the coronavirus pandemic hit and put a halt on productions across the board. Clare Crawley’s season of The Bachelorette was impacted the hardest with everything put on hold, so it became the franchise’s first priority once things got back to the “new normal”.

If all goes according to plan, Matt James’ season of The Bachelor will kick off production on its usual timeline, with a January 2021 premiere date. That will be contingent on how quarantined filming for Crawley’s season goes, and whether or not it is successful, and of course, how the world looks in the next few months. Stay tuned for updates on that as the contestants of Crawley’s season are currently gathering at a resort to quarantine for the next two weeks.

Given all of this, it is safe to assume that Bachelor in Paradise will not happen this year, and will hopefully resume its regularly scheduled summer programming in 2021 (or so we hope anyway!). Which brings me to The Bachelor senior citizen spinoff we heard so much about while Peter Weber’s season was airing.

We all saw the casting calls for seniors to apply, and I know I was amongst the many that were ecstatic at the prospect of a Bachelor show focused solely on the elderly. Grandmas and grandpas trying to find love at a later stage in their life sounds like everything we’ve always wanted.

As it turns out, The Bachelor senior citizen spinoff could have aired as early as this fall alluding to the fact that the series was much further along than any of us realized. As ABC exec. Rob Mills told Variety in a new interview, they had made quite a bit of progress before the pandemic hit:

"“Some of the casting interviews we got, they were just so touching. It’s such a different way of doing The Bachelor because these people are just at a totally different place in their lives. There is an interesting thing about people who have hit the other end of the spectrum, who’ve lived their lives, they’ve raised their kids, some have been widowed or divorced and maybe some have never been in love. We thought that would be an interesting dynamic through the Bachelor prism.”"

Want to know the best part? Hometown dates would be very different than what we’re used to. Instead of the dates consisting of meeting the parents, it would be the other way with the couples meeting each other’s kids, and perhaps even grandchildren. Seriously, could this be any cuter?!

"“It’s everything you love about The Bachelor, but everybody loves senior citizens because they have different love stories to talk about. It was really fascinating, so I have no doubt it will happen some day.”"

“Some day.” Sigh.

Mills also went on to say that once The Bachelor and The Bachelorette have resumed production and are back on track, then their next priority will be Bachelor in Paradise. Whether they will wait until its usual summer slot to air or change things up is to be determined. Honestly, things are so up in the air that anything can happen.

But once all the current shows are taken care of, then ABC will shift the focus to The Bachelor senior citizen spinoff (fingers crossed).

"“God willing, we return to some sort of normalcy in the world; we will obviously want to get back to Bachelor in Paradise because that will have been off for a year, but then I think we will absolutely want to get back to this. We absolutely want to get it done, but we want to do it right, do it safely and not at the expense of the other Bachelor cycles. So, it’s on hold, but I have to say, we had never seen a response like we’d seen here.”"

It looks like we’ll have to wait until the 2021-2022 season for The Bachelor senior citizen spinoff–but it will be well worth the wait!

Are you excited to see this spinoff eventually? Share your comments below!