Joey Graziadei’s journey to find love on The Bachelor comes to a conclusion March 25 with Season 28’s final rose ceremony. Will he get engaged? Or does the suspenseful finale teaser signal heartbreak for Graziadei?
“You’re never going to see it coming,” host Jesse Palmer said.
There was madness long before the final episodes in March, with the 28-year-old tennis instructor from Pennsylvania choosing Daisy Kent and Kelsey Anderson as his final two women during the fantasy suites episode on March 11.
In a promo for the finale, Graziadei said in a voice-over, “Today I woke up and I truthfully felt the weight of all this. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and I’m still afraid that this might not work out.”
Fans have been going crazy over the clip, wondering what it might mean and who he will ultimately choose.
“I can’t even tell you if there was a choice,” Graziadei told Us Weekly after the “Women Tell All” taping in March. “I have a level of excitement because I am ready to get to being back to Joey again. Joey, the Bachelor, has been so fun, but this is a lot it — it’s a lot to go through. It’s a lot to take in from time to time, and I’m just ready to have the answer and everything be out there, whatever happened, whatever people think, all these different theories, I’m ready for it to all be [put] to rest.”
ABC declined to comment to Yahoo Entertainment.
What do fans think happened?
There has been speculation that Graziadei picked a specific contestant, who will go unnamed (no spoilers!), because they were sharing photos with similar backdrops on their social media accounts back in February. Are the sleuths onto something?
“Obviously anything that comes out like that, I can’t really speak on it. I know people are really trying to figure out what’s going on,” Graziadei told Us Weekly.
Fans are also looking to the finale teaser to back up their theories. In it, Kent appears to have doubts about her connection with Graziadei.
“I just felt like something was, like, a little off with us,” she said on camera. “And it shouldn’t feel this way.”
Even before the season premiered in January, Palmer called the Season 28 ending an “unprecedented shocking first in Bachelor history.”
Dave Neal, host of the Bachelor Rush Hour With Dave Neal podcast, is skeptical the lead-up to the finale will be “a giant payoff.”
“People have said, ‘Oh, maybe he drops the ring in the sand and can’t find it,” he told Yahoo Entertainment. My guess is, it is happy and it’s just a little bit of a messy way to get there.”
That being said, he understands that the Bachelor Nation is hungry for clues about which woman Graziadei chooses.
“You’ve got [fans] that are tracking Airbnb accounts from producers’ credit cards,” he explained. “What you see every year is it’s easy to find confirmation bias when you look for something. If you want to look for reasons why he chose Daisy, you’ll find it and vice versa with Kelsey. So, the show has done a really good job this year of not blatantly spoiling it.”
Going into the finale
Graziadei has been praised throughout his season for the way he’s handled being the Bachelor.
That includes the women who competed for his affections too. The eliminated Season 28 contestants had nothing but nice things to say about their ex during the “Women Tell All” episode, which aired on March 18.
Neal agrees.
“I thought Joey was really great at listening and he did the impossible, which is make every woman feel special, even though he had to do that to 25 of them,” he said. “There was not one real controversial dumping and that does say a lot about someone. … Everyone he sent home had nice things to say about him. I can’t think of the last season that’s ever happened.”
Graziadei’s season would not be the success story it is without a cast of women that became extremely popular on social media, most notably Kent and Maria Georgas, who saw their followers grow substantially throughout the course of the show’s run.
Graziadei’s season is credited with revitalizing the franchise, just as Gerry Turner and his contestants did with The Golden Bachelor.
Graziadei’s fantasy suites episode was not only the most-watched episode of the season so far, according to Variety, but it also reached a larger audience than any episode of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette or Bachelor in Paradise since the finale of Clayton Echard’s season in 2022, Nielsen data shows.
Bachelor co-showrunner Claire Freeland told IndieWire that the series of events that unfolded during Graziadei’s final rose ceremony allowed producers to try something new.
“We felt like we had an opportunity to not just make the change for the sake of making a change,” Freeland said. “We had what we needed to back it up.”
The Bachelor airs March 25 at 8 p.m. ET on ABC and streams the next day on Hulu.
