‘The Bachelor’ Music-Driven Spinoff ‘Listen to Your Heart’ Picked Up To Series By ABC For Spring Premiere

Nellie Andreeva

EXCLUSIVE: ABC has greenlighted The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart, a new installment in the network’s popular Bachelor reality franchise. The new Bachelor Nation series will debut April 13 in the franchise’s core Monday 8 PM – 10 PM time slot. ABC Entertainment President Karey Burke is expected to make the announcement at TCA Wednesday.

The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart joins the current three series in the franchise, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise. It will bridge mothership The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, providing an almost continuous Bachelor Nation presence on the ABC schedule from January to September.

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In The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart, 20 single men and women — talented musicians or people whose lives and work revolve around music — search for love through music, singing well-known songs, both individually and as couples. They will meet and explore their relationships while living together and going on Bachelor-style dates that focus on music.

“Think The Bachelor in Paradise meets A Star Is Born,” Burke said.

Once the couples commit to each other, they will be tested through musical challenges, including live performances judged by top names in the music business. The performances will be evaluated based on whether they reveal the couple’s love and devotion to one another. Those who score the highest marks, will continue until only one couple is left standing.

“This is an evolution of The Bachelor franchise,” Burke said. “It is an attempt to capture what we all know, which is that love and emotion and music are intertwined.”

The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart is a production of Next Entertainment in association with Warner Horizon Unscripted Television. The Bachelor creator Mike Fleiss, Martin Hilton, Nicole Woods, Bennett Graebner, Peter Gust, Tim Warner, Louis Caric and Peter Geist will executive produce the series.

Eighteen years after its launch on ABC, The Bachelor franchise is as strong as ever with a buzzy current edition of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette ranking as summer 2019’s No. 1 TV series among Adults 18-49, and Bachelor in Paradise finishing as Monday‘s No. 2 series of the summer, behind only The Bachelorette.

Burke pointed to the continuing success of the franchise when she hinted last summer that another extension may be on the way.

Other previous Bachelor offshoots include Bachelor Pad, which aired for three seasons, and Bachelor Winter Games, used as counter-programming during the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.

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