Harrison exclusive broke down Monday's season premiere with ET Live!
Chris Harrison has some opinions about how the women on The Bachelor handled the news of Colton Underwood's virginity.
The 47-year-old longtime host spoke exclusively to ET Live's Lauren Zima on Tuesday following the show's live, three-hour premiere the night before, and dished about what the 26-year-old's virgin status meant to the 30 women vying for his heart.
"I don’t know how to delicately put this, but maybe there is a trophy to be taken out there, you know?" Harrison said. "Much was made of the fact that he’s a virgin and we’re going to get to a much deeper, emotional level to the virginity and what it means and why and all that, but yeah, I think that early on the game was raised a little bit because of that."
"I think you see that there was this maybe uncomfortable situation of, ‘How do the woman approach that?’ One of the things I love about this show is pushing those social dilemmas and the social dynamics of this guy’s a virgin," he continued. "[You'll] see he’s not shy. He’s a virgin, but he’s definitely not shy. These are not virgin moves out there in the ocean."
Harrison went on to add that, in his opinion, the women "definitely saw a trophy there."
"Then you add on top of the fact that he’s a good guy, he’s a catch. Game on. Game definitely on," he said.
When it comes to Underwood's virginity, Harrison also teased that it's one of the things that makes for "a very emotional season."
"All I will tease -- there’s two stories that need to be told, but the people that tell the story, it is theirs to be told," Harrison said of the season's trailer, which promised a moment that "changes everything." "I’m not trying to tee this up and make it bigger than it really is, it’s just a very personal situation and it would not be right for me to tell this story for either one of them."
Harrison confirmed that one of the people with a story to tell is Underwood himself, while the other is one of the women on the show.
"They just let go and they tell these really personal stories and it really breaks the season and it breaks Colton wide open," Harrison said. "That’s where, to me, we had this huge discernible shift in the show, in the emotion of the show and the direction it took."
Fans, it turns out, won't have to wait long to see the scene to which Harrison is referring.
"It really gets there pretty quickly," he revealed. "It was a beautiful scene and then it prompted me to have a very serious conversation with Colton that you’ll also see... I hate to say, ‘You’ll have to watch to find out,’ but that will come very quickly in the show."
Another standout moment from the trailer came when Underwood is seen jumping a fence and appears to run away. That moment, Harrison said, is due to the "very raw" season.
"Obviously, you saw Colton in tears and there was this roller coaster ride... Later in the season, about halfway through, we talk about his virginity, why he is the way he is and some of the other women and their emotional stories, that is definitely theirs to tell. I don’t want to ruin that for anything," Harrison said. "When you go through The Bachelor -- and I know it’s a TV show and I know it’s entertainment -- but when you are the Bachelor or the Bachelorette you are emotionally stripped down and you’re taken on this journey and that journey is very real and it’s very raw. And for Colton, he really let himself go and that got rough at times. And, one of those times, he was just ready to be done."
"You’ll see that unfold, but I lost the Bachelor for a while. That is true," he admitted.
Above all, though, Harrison revealed that Underwood's journey is "unlike anything you're ever gonna see."
"He had a rough patch and we all kind of had to get him through that if we wanted to make this successful," Harrison said. "He didn’t make it easy on us at times and he challenged us, which I love. And I mean that in a good way. He was not difficult to work with, he’s a really good guy. He was very much beloved by me and the crew, but he challenged us."
As for the eager Bachelor Nation members that are already trying to predict who the next Bachelorette will be, Harrison said: "We haven't even started thinking about that yet."
"I do not know who the next Bachelorette is," Harrison promised. "... This live show we pulled off last night took so much manpower that we spread around the country. It took a lot over the holidays, so kudos to the Bachelor family, but we really did put the Bachelorette talk on the back burner, so I promise you, we have not even come close to starting that conversation yet."
Watch the video below for more on Underwood's Bachelor season:
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