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Chris Harrison, former host of “The Bachelor,” is returning to television as a morning show co-host and host and creator of a new dating reality show. He will also team up with Dr. Phil McGraw to contribute to “Dr. Phil Prime Time.”
This is part of an overall deal Harrison signed with McGraw’s Merit Street Media, a new broadcast and streaming network created by McGraw. The network will launch on April 2.
The morning talk show, which will debut in the fall or winter, will be co-hosted by Harrison and his wife, Lauren Zima. It will be filmed at the Merit Street Media studios, which are located in Dallas, Texas, where the couple resides.
Not many details have been revealed about the dating reality series Harrison will create and host, but Dr. Phil noted that it will be “so fresh, so different,” adding, “It has dating elements, but this is very different and so new. It’s flipping the script in a way that I think people will get addicted to within a week. Is incredible.”
This marks Harrison’s return to the genre after 19 years as the face of Bachelor Nation. He had a controversial exit from the franchise in 2021 after making racially insensitive comments while defending season 25 winner Rachael Kirkconnell. At the time, Variety reported that he received approximately $9 million to leave.
“Call it divine intervention, karma, kismet, whatever, the fact that Dr. Phil created this network in my own backyard here in Dallas, it means the world to me, not only to return to television, but to do it. here in a local crowd,” Harrison said Entertainment tonight of the new opportunity.
Harrison began working with Merit Street Media contributing to “Dr. Phil Primetime,” where she did “some very penetrating field work related to some of these romance scams, these catfish type things.”