ABC "The Bachelorette" stars Clare Crawley.
Bachelor Nation has been waiting a long time for Clare Crawley‘s season of The Bachelorette to begin, but how long will they have to wait for the first episode to end?
The answer is a wild and crazy two hours.
The first episode of every season of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette is a chance for the lead to reintroduce himself or herself to the audience. That’s followed by the long list of suitors meeting the Bachelor or Bachelorette in front of the mansion. Then there’s a cocktail party that ends with the elimination of several contestants to wrap up the show.
While Crawley’s season promises to be anything but traditional, don’t expect it to stray from the usual format too much.
Is Every Episode of The Bachelorette 2 Hours Long?
Yep. Buckle up, because each episode is a doozy.
It wasn’t always that way. The early seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette were just an hour long before gradually growing to the two-hour episodes of today.
“When we started, the show was eight one-hour episodes, and now it’s 10 two-hour episodes plus a bunch of specials,” The Bachelorette executive producer Nicole Woods told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “We barely traveled; it was primarily L.A.-based. Since then, we’ve doubled in size, if not tripled, as far as our staff and crew. We have more elaborate dates. We are also multi-generational. You can see it in the Chris Harrison tribute we did on the live Bachelor premiere last season that even down to the wardrobe, the show has evolved a lot.”
But as starved for the return of the show as Bachelor Nation is, it’s probably for the best that it isn’t a three-hour premiere. That’s how the show kicked off Peter Weber’s season of The Bachelor in January 2020. That was a little much.