In the opening moments of The Golden Bachelor, the newest addition to the US reality show franchise, a dapper man who could be in his late 50s straightens his tie before picking up a hearing aid and discreetly fitting it behind one ear. This is Gerry, who, we learn, lost his wife several years ago and is soon depicted sobbing unrestrainedly in a way that, were this a crime drama, would send him straight to the top of the suspects list. Instead Gerry, at 72, is the first pensioner to lead America’s biggest and longest-running dating show. “How lucky would I be,” he asks, with exquisite delivery of concept, “to find a second true love in my lifetime?”
Dating shows don’t tell us much about the world we live in except via the back door of whom they leave out. In the US, The Bachelor – in which a single man dates a pool of women, ostensibly with the intention of choosing a wife – has been running since 2002, and didn’t have a Black male lead until 2021. Occasionally, the producers accidentally book a closeted gay man who comes out after filming (Colton Underwood, season 23) but no one has ever put a gay bachelor in on purpose. In the UK, the closest the dating show landscape has come to pushing the boundaries is My Mum, Your Dad, an ITV1 show hosted by Davina McCall that launched earlier this year and featured adult children nominating their middle-aged single parents, and the hot young gay men of BBC 3’s I Kissed a Boy, fronted by Dannii Minogue.
In all of these shows, the basic principles of reality TV flatten even the spin-offs into exactly the same product. Gerry (he pronounces it “Gary”) is in great nick – he looks a bit like Charlton Heston, with the high colour of a man in a state of perpetual alarm – as are the women, most of whom are a solid 10 years his junior. They are racially diverse but uniformly thin and well put together, dressed in traditional high feminine style. (The one in the tracksuit gets sent home on the first night). They all purport to be feverish believers in the show’s fantasy mission.
Gerry himself, meanwhile, is suave and boyish, and toasts the 22 women with orange juice on the first night: a heads-up, it seems to me, on a possible history with alcohol to boost the drama of the second half of the season.
It’s all baloney. And yet, five episodes in, I am finding aspects of the spectacle oddly touching. In the first episode, the women rock up, per format, in the Bachelor limo, and one by one walk the carpet to meet Gerry. To Edith, 60, he says, “You look lovely.” Of April, 65, he says, “Wow. Lovely woman,” while April tells us she’s trying to remember “who I was before I was a caretaker and a matriarch”. Ellen, 71, says, “I really like the fact that Gerry likes pickleball. He could be the one!”
Even after being stress-tested and encouraged to express their worst selves – “There’s no way she’s over 60!” snaps one woman, doing a sucked-lemon face that efficiently announces her as the likely villain of the piece – the sight of these women and even good old Gerry submitting themselves to judgment at an age when it is already in oversupply has a certain pathos. Breaking with the humourless tone of the entire reality genre, Gerry says, wryly: “I’ll be the first Bachelor who’s on social security.” If you can keep your lunch down while the host uses phrases like “sexy senior”, The Golden Bachelor isn’t without its charms.
So far it is doing surprisingly well. The premiere last month drew record ratings on ABC and Hulu, scoring 7.7 million viewers across all platforms, the highest of any opening in the Bachelor franchise for the last three years. And while the contestants aren’t “old” in any real sense, they are old relative to the people we’re used to seeing on this show, and appear calmer, wiser, and with a grain more generosity than the average contestant. In spite of the artifice, I found myself being simultaneously moved and appalled by what seemed to be a genuine belief by these women that they had a chance of falling in love with Gerry, this one random guy.
A final detail, embedded in the opening episode to mark it out from the usual Bachelor fare: the arrival of a 23rd contestant, a woman who was not thin, or wearing a silk dress and heels, and who, it was announced, was – get ready to clutch your sides – 84 years old. This was the late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s Aunt Chippy, a regular comic guest on his show, appearing as a massive joke for one episode only. Aunt Chippy exited the limo with the line “Go to hell”, fell asleep during selection, and at the end of the proceedings asked if she could keep the sofa. She was, obviously and by a long chalk, the most attractive person within a 10-mile radius of the show.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
