Some people enjoy the thrill of a good televised romance. They believe in love. Not me, though. I like my reality TV messy—like The Golden Bachelor split.
When I saw the news on April 12 that The Golden Bachelor’s Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist were divorcing only three months after their televised wedding, I had to laugh. Yes! Now we’re talking.
It’s not that I hate love. I just don’t watch reality TV for it. And while the Bachelor franchise—which I’ve watched off and on for most of its 20-year run—is ostensibly about two soulmates finding each other, I’ve been around long enough to know the truth. The Bachelor franchise is about drama.
It’s been an interesting few years for the now-staple of unscripted television. In the late 2010s, the series entered what I’d call an “influencer boom.” For a brief moment in time, women who went on the show for “love” were coming away with 1 million plus Instagram followers, many of whom like Hannah Brown, JoJo Fletcher, and even runner-runner ups like Hannah Godwin were able to make influencing their full-time careers.
Good for them, but bad for the series. Fans began to complain that many of the contestants were going on the show for followers rather than true love, calling it an “influencer factory.” The Bachelor, they complained, was anything but “genuine and real.”
But The Golden Bachelor, they said, was a breath of fresh air. It turns out, all producers needed to do to weed out the “fakes” was to make the dating pool full of retirees. The Golden Bachelor became a hit, largely because everyone started to believe again that the contestants were there for the all-powerful “right reasons.”
In a December article in The Ringer, writer Ben Lindbergh declared that the new iteration of the show had breathed life into the franchise by becoming “what The Bachelor always wanted to be.” Mainly, he noted, bringing the “appearance of authenticity” to the brand.
“The franchise sells itself through the spectacle of whirlwind romance and the potential for enduring relationships. On The Golden Bachelor, that’s an easier sell,” he wrote.
And for producers, it paid off. Variety reported the show’s finale was the most watched franchise episode in nearly three years, and an executive said on a Ringer podcast that its success had led the network to try and borrow aspects of what worked for Golden into the rest of the show. He called it the three Hs: “humor, heart, and hope.”
It seemed like Bachelor Nation was loving its return to its fairytale romance roots. But can I tell you something? The series just…didn’t do it for me.
Maybe I’m a cynic, but I don’t watch reality television for a tissue-clutching, heartwarming, romantic story fit for a Disney film. I watch it for mess! I watch it to see people fight and bicker and say wild things! I watch it for Clayton Eckerd somehow making three women mad at him at once! Like, remember Hannah and Jed? Ari and Becca? Melissa and Jason? My queen of chaos, Clare Crawley? That’s the TV I crave.
