Say goodbye to your boring Mondays, because The Bachelorette is back.
Hannah Brown makes her debut with tonight’s episode, and while many of us were concerned about her wildly awkward turn on After the Final Rose as she handed out the season’s very first rose while struggling with full sentences, apparently, she’s not going to let us down.
You see, Chris Harrison was also very, very worried about whether or not ABC had made the right decision about its newest star.
“It really was a trainwreck,” Harrison told E! News. “She was kind of tragic, and I was scared to death. I know Bachelor Nation was like, oh wow, this is our Bachelorette? I know they were skeptical. I was…scared.”
Have no fear, however, because Harrison says once the season actually started filming, he was no longer quite so scared (meaning we don’t have to worry about quite as much secondhand embarrassment).
“Thankfully she came in on night one firing on all cylinders, and 10 minutes in, I’m like, OK, this is the woman. This is who we picked. This is Hannah,” he says. “She came in and crushed it.”
So far, we know three main things about the 24 year-old Hannah: She’s from Alabama. She’s a pageant queen (Miss Alabama, in fact). And she has a fierce side to her known as Hannah Beast.
Harrison says that Hannah Beast actually comes out night one, as the new Bachelorette “verbally put a guy in the doghouse.”
“It doesn’t take long,” he says. “You’re not going to get through the first episode without seeing Hannah come in and take care of her own business.”
But as the promos have promised, we’ll soon know much more about Hannah Alabama, and we won’t just be thinking of her as just a beauty queen for much longer.
“If you think you know Hannah, if you think she’s just this beauty queen from Alabama, you’re missing the picture, and you’re missing the woman,” Harrison says. “It really is…it’s shedding that image. She really is this strong, badass bold woman that’s gonna take the Bachelorette crown by storm.”
In the video above, Harrison teases that there are some injuries this season, an ambulance or two, and one very interesting thing about one of this season’s big “villains.”
“There’s gonna be villains, and it’s not your typical villain,” he says. “It’s not the typical bad guy that’s like a flash in the pan and goes away—although there are those too…What really creates the drama, what really drives this entire season and may dictate how this ends for Hannah and kind of reflects and affects the rest of her life is the drama lasts, and it’s about people she cares about. It’s not just oh here’s the bad guy, he’s gone. This thing festers and has to deal with the entire kind of undertone to the season. So that’s what’s really going to shape the season, and what I think people are going to take away.”
If you ask us, it sounds like Hannah’s got eyes for a bad boy which sounds both very irritating and entertaining at the same time. So bring it on!
The Bachelorette premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on ABC.