Nature versus X on The Golden Bachelor
Graham Hillard
In June 2021, Warner Horizon and ABC Entertainment parted ways with Chris Harrison, the longtime host of The Bachelor. Harrison’s exit, following a four-month, will-he-or-won’t-he intrigue, was directly traceable to the veteran TV personality’s failure to condemn sufficiently a contestant who had once attended an Antebellum-themed sorority party. Though Harrison asked merely that the offending young woman not be “thrown to the lions,” his remarks unfit him in an instant to continue as the show’s emcee. The takeaway? The Bachelor is decidedly not the kind of franchise one would expect to place a dead white guy in the lead.
Or an old one, anyway. Starring as the title figure of spinoff series The Golden Bachelor (Thursdays at 8 p.m.), 71-year-old Gerry Turner is precisely the wrong kind of man to please the Very Online liberals of Bachelor Nation. A retired restaurateur and widower from Mike Pence country, Turner has the aw-shucks mien of a corn farmer and the bronze complexion of a man who occasionally goes outside. If, as the Harrison affair suggested, the ideal Bachelor participant knows instinctively which way the online posts are blowing, Turner’s selection is difficult to understand as anything but an affront. If one can’t quite picture him voting for former President Donald Trump, one is nevertheless hard-pressed to imagine the latest Ibram X. Kendi tome on his bedside table.
THE MODERN MASCULINITY MACGUFFIN
Yet selected Turner has been, a move that, in classic Bachelor fashion, will now be played in reverse as our hero chooses a mate from among 22 single ladies. The seven youngest contestants have a full six decades under their belts but can largely pass for 50, with occupations ranging from fitness instructor to retired interior designer. The two oldest, a pair of sprightly 75-year-olds, could probably run circles around your humble correspondent. When, earlier this year, ABC announced the new series, fans wondered aloud whether a randy December would embarrass himself among smirking Mays. Happily, no. By casting age-appropriate women, the network’s executives have taken an unexpected high road and headed off much reasonable complaint. If our leading man is going to come from the land of rotary phones, his lasses must do so, as well.
Like the flagship series, The Golden Bachelor begins with a parade of limousines. Ladies emerge one by one to greet their prospective beau and take a first crack at winning his heart. In my innocence, I assumed before watching that the new show’s brood of hens would eschew theatrics and conduct themselves with a measure of dignity. Instead, one contestant roars up on a motorcycle, another feigns comic decrepitude, while still another flashes her “birthday suit” (actually a flesh-colored slip) in a distressingly effective attempt to create a “moment.”
The Bachelor has never been a study in restraint. Why should we expect the elderly to do better? Despite maintaining a facade of courtesy, the newest contestants behave mostly as the self-interested game-players they are, “borrowing” or “stealing” Gerry “for a minute” whenever another woman looks poised to rise in his affections. The goal of each episode, as in past seasons, is to win a rose, the physical token with which the lead indicates his continuing interest. Needless to say, there are fewer roses than players. One (or more) at a time, contestants fall from the bachelor’s graces, cry a bit, and get tossed out on their surprisingly well-toned behinds.
Part of The Bachelor’s fun lies in guessing, in early episodes, which women are likely to do well. Unlike in, say, Survivor, where a castaway’s appearance has little to do with his fortunes, ABC’s reality show is an unapologetic ode to aesthetic discrimination. To be sure, no ugly women have made the cut, though one or two probably ought to sue their plastic surgeons. Still, there are gradations of beauty even here. Look for Gerry to form an “intense spiritual connection” with whomever is youngest and prettiest.
This is not to say that our hero is likely to prove a cad. In fact, I defy anyone not to be moved by the story of Gerry’s first marriage, told in Polaroids and backed by a plaintive Cat Stevens. A man of obvious decency, Gerry may well take an open mind into the group dates and one-on-ones with which the series culls its herds. But the show’s regressiveness is essentially unalterable. Eligible women fawning over a man and submitting to his arbitrary judgment? With apologies to Ron DeSantis’s Florida, The Bachelor really is where woke goes to die.
Perhaps this is why the franchise has historically gone out of its way to appease the Left, a practice that has involved not only “cancellations” but also endless liberal hand-wringing about the social order. If the show’s very nature is problematic, its behavior must be beyond reproach. Nevertheless, I am surely not alone in thinking there is something different about this season, and not only because the participants are old. An almost archetypal Middle American, Gerry is too normal, too kind, too Indianan to speak the language of political correctness with any fluency. He isn’t un-woke but pre-woke. Watching The Golden Bachelor, we might as well be living once more in 1975.
One could do worse than to tune in to ABC’s latest for exactly this prelapsarian sweetness. Where else will we ever find such unself-consciousness fun again? Yes, the series is stilted, repetitive, and aggressively stupid. But it’s also something of a joy, at least in its latest form. As Gerry himself is soon to rediscover, love is about compromise. To stay in his company, one might be willing to put up with quite a lot.
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Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.