Are you not entertained?
As an increase in cord-cutting leaves networks with smaller audiences, a strategy to attract more senior viewers—traditional network TV’s bread and butter—has become more essential. If we are to believe the publicity campaign around “The Golden Bachelor,” ABC wants the show to right two wrongs: That romance among senior citizens does not get enough attention, and that not enough programming is created for that age group, the network’s core viewership.
Those goals are, respectively, commendable and commercially sound. But I am skeptical ABC can thread that pair of needles with a retread of a hoary old reality TV format originally designed to exploit the brazenness of twentysomethings looking for love in luxe locales.
The trailers for “The Golden Bachelor” allow for no optimism that the show will greatly deviate from the formula: The bachelor and the 22 women seeking his affections in a lavish southern California mansion will serve up the same mix of entitlement (his) and desperation (theirs) that has characterized every iteration of the franchise over two decades.
That Gerry Turner, the eponymous “golden” bachelor, is 72, and the competing women range from 60 to 75, is fodder for cliches and jokes about age—and pickleball, a game many of them say they play. In the previews, the women wear gowns and dresses, rather than bikinis.
“The Golden Bachelor” is no more a sensitive (much less serious) examination of love in the time of senescence than, say, HBO Max’s “My Mom, Your Dad,” in which young adults secretly watched their parents dating each other in a house called Second Chance Retreat. On the other hand, to damn ABC’s new show with faint praise, it is not nearly as loathsome as TLC’s “MILF Manor,” in which eight mothers, confined to a Mexican seaside villa, chose dates from a group comprising their grown-up sons.
(I’ll pause here to let you go heave up your lunch in the bathroom.)
There is very likely a solid market for a reality TV show about elderly romance. The original “Bachelor” has a strong following among older women. And real life provides plenty of cues for programming: Dating among senior citizens is growing increasingly common, and the proliferation of dating apps for over-50 singles suggests there’s money to be made from this trend.
But seniors deserve to be taken seriously, including in their entertainment choices.
While they wait for the first original reality TV show targeted at them, senior citizens can thank goodness for streaming services, where there’s a growing library of scripted content about and for their cohort. The gold standard remains “As Time Goes By,” the 1992-2005 BBC series starring Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer as grown-ups navigating the tricky shoals of romance. If the folks at ABC don’t want to take a chance with originality, they’d do well to seek inspiration here.