The Bachelor Season 25: Matt James announced as the next Bachelor

The Bachelor has announced that Matt James will be handing out roses in Season 25

We don’t know when The Bachelor is going to return to the air, but when it does we know who will be leading the next season.

After a season with Pilot Pete that had more alternate endings than Clue, and left a lot to be desired, Bachelor Nation is going to watch as Matt James tries to find love.

ABC made the announcement official on Good Morning America on Friday.

However intentional it may be, it’s a step in the right direction for a show that has been embarrassingly lacking diversity. Matt’s season will mark just the second time in the history of the series that a season will follow a Bachelor or Bachelorette who isn’t white. Rachel Lindsay appeared on The Bachelorette in 2017 and it marked the first time in the show’s then-34 combined years of history that a black Bachelor or Bachelorette had been chosen.

The Bachelor finally listens to fans calling for more diversity on the show

The decision to name Matt the next Bachelor comes after ABC and producers of the show were pressured by a fan-driven petition that directly called out and criticized the whiteness of the show’s history. The criticism isn’t new, but the calls to make the show more inclusive and representative of the real world have been growing in recent years. Matt is just the second-ever black lead on the show, and it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out how low the percentage of representation has been throughout the history of The Bachelor and its many spinoffs.

Matt was slated to appear in the upcoming season of the Bachelorette, in which Clare Crawley was going to be the season lead. But the global COVID-19 pandemic halted production on the show (as it did on many shows) which allowed producers some time to step back and think about the future of the series.

The future that was pondered, as it turns out, was giving Matt his own season of The Bachelor.

Whether or not Clare’s contestants will be recast is yet to be seen, but Bachelor Nation has other news to digest as we wait for new seasons of the show to arrive.