First of all, yes, this show is a silly show that is not anything serious and is really for only an audience that watches The Bachelor/Bachelorette series. The show didn't need any changes. It's for a small audience and it is a guilty pleasure.
But someone at Disney thought it needed a big budget and needed to be shot at a resort instead of the original beach.
How did ABC / Disney / Hulu manage to take a charming, somewhat tacky, funny yet unserious little show, shot on a real beach with not too many cameras and not overproduced, and turn it into another version of Love Island, but much worse? No one who loves the OG Bachelor in Paradise show is asking for this. This 2025 season, it is not being filmed on the beach in Mexico where are all the other BIP seasons were shot. Instead, it is being filmed in a fancy resort where they all hang out by a pool.
The over-the-top music and ridiculously over-sexualized intros in episode one were awful. The silly BIP theme is gone, along with those goofy intros that showed our reality TV stars laughing at themselves. And what happened to the playfulness on the beach, and the funny titles under everyone's names? We aren't looking for F Boi Island or Love Island where they pose and prance like influencers, and hang out by a boring pool, and play Love Island type games, we just want our old show back. They had immediate access to a beach on the OG Bachelor in Paradise and they spent most of their time on that beach. They had real bugs and they had crabs that would invade their rooms, and they got sweaty out there on the beach and their makeup ran and it was all very real, and that's how people meet. If you still want to get to know someone while they're sweating because there's no air conditioning and screaming about crabs, then it may be true love. We need the ORIGINAL tiki bar with Wells, we need everything like it originally was.
Until the producers change things, I have watched my last episode of Bachelor in Paradise. Yes, it's just a silly little show that truly was nothing more than a guilty pleasure, but I enjoyed it more than I did The Bachelor or The Bachelorette because at least we could laugh! The peak was probably when they had David Spade as a guest host. It was never meant to be some overproduced Disney mess.
TL;DR: The producers somehow managed to take a charming, tacky, funny little show and turn it into just another reality TV love genre filmed at a generic Love Island type resort.
