The Golden Bachelor Premiere Is Horny and Heartfelt
Spoilers for night one of The Golden Bachelor ahead.
The same song—2022’s “Golden Hour” by indie pop artist JVKE—plays in both promos for The Golden Bachelor and during the final moments of And Just Like That…’s second season. Beyond their shared soundtrack, these shows face a similar challenge when it comes to depicting love after a certain age: How do you retain the freewheeling spirit of Sex and the City or The Bachelor while accurately reflecting the realities of dating as an older person?
During Thursday’s cozy premiere of The Golden Bachelor, which is getting a major marketing push from ABC via retirement-home screenings and senior-inspired discounts, it became clear that this series may have transformed more smoothly than its scripted counterpart. This starts with the slam dunk casting of 72-year-old widower Gerry Turner as the first Golden Bachelor. He’s a retired restaurateur, father, and grandfather who spends his days at a lake house in Indiana that was meant to be shared with his late wife, Toni. Gerry and Toni were high school sweethearts, married for 43 years before she became ill and died suddenly in 2017.
Tears arrive early as Cat Stevens’s “The Wind” plays over photos of Gerry and Toni’s life together. He gazes at a framed photo of his wife while dressing for the evening, putting on his hearing aid before adjusting his tuxedo jacket. Later in the evening, Nancy, a 60-year-old interior designer, will show off her own hearing aids: “I, too, wear a little ear candy.” The start of Gerry’s journey to find love is sentimental, but for the first time in a long time for this franchise, that feeling is earned—a result of our lead’s actual life experiences rather than a cloying device.
A woman shuffles out of the limo and across the driveway using a walker. “Do you need help?” Gerry asks. That’s when Leslie, a 64-year-old fitness instructor, tosses her prop and tears away her muumuu to reveal a strapless minidress. “Do I look like I need help?” quips the woman who in her intro package says she dated Prince and inspired his 1979 hit “Sexy Dancer.”
And so begins a lively series of limo entrances. Sandra, a 75-year-old retired executive assistant, introduces Gerry to her “Zen practice,” which involves repeated chanting of curse words. Faith, a 60-year-old high school teacher, arrives on a motorcycle. “I’m proof you can live fast and not die young,” she says. “If you leave here with me, it will be the ride of your life.” Susan, a 66-year-old wedding officiant, makes note of her stilettos before delivering this dirty disclaimer: “I’m very comfortable with six inches.”
The show can’t resist trotting out a few of its tried-and-true entrance methods. April, a 65-year-old therapist, aligns herself with an animal, doing the chicken dance upon arrival because her “eggs are still fresh.” “Chippy,” Jimmy Kimmel’s 84-year-old aunt, shows up for a celebrity cameo, which results in a stale gimmick about sleeping through the rose ceremony (“Can I at least get a petal?” she asks host Jesse Palmer). And Theresa, who is celebrating her 70th birthday, makes the scantily clad limo exit that usually includes a bikini or lingerie. This time, she opens her silk robe to reveal her “birthday suit,” which turns out to be merely a nude-colored slip. Theresa couldn’t have actually gone naked, she explains, on the account of her six grandsons watching at home.
But grandmothers or not, Gerry’s 22 contestants, who range from age 60 to 75, aren’t afraid to get spicy. Natascha, a 60-year-old pro-aging coach who sits cross-legged from Gerry on a yoga mat in the mansion, observes: “Gerry is in good shape. I’m not going to have to resuscitate him if we have an intimate moment.” Later in the evening, Gerry presents Theresa with a birthday cupcake before offering one of the smoother opening lines uttered by a Bachelor in recent memory: “If I were to take a bite of that and then were to have a whole bunch of icing [on my face], would you help clean it up?” Theresa accepts her birthday present, later earnestly admitting in a confessional, “It’s been forever since I kissed a guy, and it was incredible.”
Barry Keoghan, Charles Melton, and Hunter Schafer Kick Off Oscar Week in Style at Vanity Fair and Instagram’s Vanities Party
Barry Keoghan, Charles Melton, and Hunter Schafer Kick Off Oscar Week in Style at Vanity Fair and Instagram’s Vanities Party
Much of the tight one-hour premiere exudes that same soft and sexy energy—the kind not often shown from anyone over the age of 35 in the reality-TV dating space. Unlike the miscommunication-based absurdities of Netflix’s Love Is Blind or CW’s FBoy Island, these contestants have enough experience and perspective to know what they want and express why with specificity. The women are freed from the burden of a ticking biological clock or need to fulfill a societal ideal of marriage. At one point, a contestant asks Gerry, “what do you want your next 30 years, or however we have left, to look like?” There are no qualms about what this is—a second chance at finding someone to spend the rest of your days with, a process less concerned about the outcome than the fact that the opportunity has been presented at all.
This spin-off couldn’t have arrived at a better time in Bachelor franchise history. In recent years, the series has been creatively stagnant, a dinosaur in the reality-TV dating space casting the same crop of Instagrammable contestants and increasingly raising the stakes to the detriment of any actual romance. But The Golden Bachelor’s contestants weren’t raised on The Bachelor or trained to sniff out who’s there for the “right reasons.” When one contestant plays music so that she and Gerry can dance, the rest of the cast joins in with aplomb; as the coveted first impression rose is laid out on the table, several of the women have to be reminded what it represents.
It’s motorcycle-revving Faith who captures the rose, and the front-runner status that comes along with it. “It’s not because you rode in on a motorcycle,” Gerry tells her. “It’s not even because you have a beautiful voice, and you sang a song to me. It’s because of what you’re doing right now. You’re making me feel special.” And there’s no early-bird special when it comes to the rest of the night’s roses—they’re doled out at a brutal 7:30 in the morning as Gerry sheds tears for the women he sends home.
Rest assured, The Bachelor still plans on exploiting the youthful. The bloated, tequila-soaked two-hour premiere of Bachelor in Paradise followed The Golden Bachelor, and it was business as usual—complete with body glitter, courtship ignited by Instagram DM, and a running tally of how many times the Gen Z contestants uttered the word “vibes.” Thirty-year-old contestant Will has the audacity to claims, “Time is running out—I’m getting old.” Just tell that to the hopelessly romantic boomers of The Golden Bachelor, who in a preview of the season appear more engaged in their love lives than most people half their age.
