Reality-dating show breaks formula via star older than 40
Reality-dating shows often test contestants’ strength, bravery or confidence. In a quest for love, they run through obstacle courses, scream through bungee jumps and get up onstage to tell stories, make jokes or model.
Rarely do these challenges include fertility tests. But “Labor of
Love,” a new reality show on Fox, isn’t your typical dating show. On its premiere episode last month, the show’s producer and host Kristin Davis invited the 15 male contestants to climb into a trailer and emerge with a sperm sample, which would be analyzed to determine whether these men could give the leading lady, Kristy Katzmann, one very important thing she’s looking for: a baby.
“We thought the men were just going to leave over what was going to happen,” Davis says in a phone interview, recalling that first challenge.
The men did not, in fact, run away. They submitted their samples, and Alan, a 39-year-old writer from South Africa, was crowned the most fertile.
Katzmann isn’t just looking for a sperm donor. She wants it all: a loving husband who wants to have children. She’s realistic, too — if she doesn’t fall in love on this reality show, she’s open to being a platonic co-parent with one of her contestants, or passing over all of them and becoming a single mother.
Unlike other reality-dating shows (ahem, “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette”) that often treat one’s 30s as nearly too late to fall in love and start a family, “Labor of Love” is straightforward about the fact that many people are pairing off and having children later in life. At 41, Katzmann isn’t cast as a sad woman, desperate to settle down. She’s portrayed as a woman who knows what she wants.
Katzmann went “The Bachelor” route once before. She was a contestant on Brad Womack’s 2007 season, making it to Week 5, when Womack eliminated her, saying she was “mature and composed,” and perhaps “too refined” for him.
In Davis, who played Charlotte York Goldenblatt on “Sex and the City,” Katzmann has a wise guide. Davis, 55, knows what it’s like to build a family on your own — she’s unmarried and adopted two children. Davis notes that she and her friends would privately discuss the fact that they wanted children and didn’t have them yet, but “it seemed like there wasn’t necessarily the freedom to talk about it in a larger cultural sense.”
Might “Labor of Love” change viewers’ notions of single men and women in their 40s? “I don’t ever really feel like you can change someone’s mind with a TV show,” Davis says. “I think you can illuminate other people’s existence, and that might create change in some people.”
Unlike “The Bachelor,” which is hyper-focused on getting the lead engaged by the end of the season, Davis says she isn’t attached to a specific outcome for Katzmann. “I have no investment in Kristy getting married,” Davis says. “I have an investment in Kristy getting happy, being happy, being satisfied with her choices, having a baby, getting the things that she wants. And whatever way that works out for her is whatever way that works out . ... You have choices. I’m there to represent that.”