After the slow-motion car crash that was the end of The Golden Bachelor, I was prepared for the first season of its sister show to flop. I watched most of Gerry Turner's journey to find love with tears in my eyes, and as Alex Sujong Laughlin wrote at the time, the new entry into the Bachelor pantheon offered "a refreshing break from the onslaught of cheap trauma the franchise has been churning out the last few years." That joy was short-lived, as it tends to be in the Bachelor universe.
One day before the season finale, The Hollywood Reporter published a story titled "The Golden Bachelor's Not-So-Golden Past." In the grand scheme of Bachelor scandals, Turner's was rather tame; there were no allegations of antebellum cosplay or sexual abuse. The most dramatic revelations were about the two women Turner had dated since the death of his wife. As THR noted, "He was single and a widower, after all, not cheating. But his amorous activity certainly didn’t align with how he regularly yanked viewers’ heartstrings with on-air announcements about his lack of a love life since his wife died."
For this lack of disclosure, I didn't blame Turner—he didn't seem wily enough to conceive of that kind of deception. Instead, the whole scandal read to me as yet another unforced error from the producers of The Bachelor. Because of their supposedly world-class background checks, there's little doubt that the producers knew of Turner's past "amorous activity" and chose to exclude it in service of a squeaky-clean narrative about a celibate 70-year-old man.
All of this, along with the two years it took production to find Turner, was on my mind as I tuned in to The Golden Bachelorette. Finding one greying Prince Charming worthy of our television screens and ultimately our hearts proved an impossible task. Now I was supposed to believe this clown car of a show had found 24? I knew as I watched that I simply shouldn't get invested in these sexagenarian men, that a day would come when I would be forced to find out that one of them loved Ronald Reagan just a little bit too much. I promised myself to approach The Golden Bachelorette the same way I'd approach a shark documentary. I would enjoy myself, but not so much that I'd want to go swimming with them. My heart would be stone, my tears saved for men whose 2016 voting records were guaranteed not to embarrass me. I would be unmoved by the prom dates and the nostalgic needle drops and the stories of grief and hope.
I failed immediately.
I expected to be thoroughly charmed by Joan Vassos, who left Turner's season to support her daughter through postpartum depression and has some of the best hair I've ever seen on a white woman. What I wasn't expecting was how quickly her journey would be eclipsed by the real love story of this season.
Having ingested far too many iterations of this franchise, I was used to the occasional heartwarming bromance. These friendships were either quickly broken up by an early elimination or overshadowed by the dick-measuring contests that tend to occur in rooms like these. But Joan's men are too wise for that (at least so far). Instead, every episode of The Golden Bachelorette has been an unexpectedly delightful reminder of just how much dudes rock—except the dudes in question are all discussing how often they get up to pee in the middle of the night.
In an illustrative scene from the third episode, two of the contestants, Charles L. and Gary, made a quick run to the pharmacy. Usually contestants aren't allowed to leave the Bachelor Mansion, but the rules governing this universe seem a bit more relaxed now that the men involved are all presumably at least three decades older than the production assistants tasked with corralling them. The two silver foxes wandered through the aisles, grabbing melatonin and sleep masks and earplugs while Charles explained the situation in a voice-over.
"The guys don't sleep well," he said. "We have snoring. Some people go to the bathroom a couple of times a night. And the beds are not good. They are too soft. We need to sleep well with sweet dreams for Joan." With a small smile that melted my heart, he declared that he's "going to fix the sleeping problem for all of us here." Charles and Gary were given a hero's welcome upon their return to the mansion.
All of this was interwoven with footage from one of Joan's dates, which even Wayne Newton's surprise appearance couldn't make me care about. Instead, as this season progresses, I'm finding myself desperate for screen time of these men just hanging out with each other.
There was the scene from night one where Jack, a retired caterer from Chicago, wandered awestruck around the Bachelor mansion. He pointed at a wall full of candles and declared, "That's at least 74 candles." He was correct. Then there's Pascal, a French salon owner also from Chicago, who paid another contestant $100 a load to wash his clothes while admitting entirely un-self-consciously to the camera that he's high-maintenance. The tensest moments in the season so far were when a barbecue date devolved into debates over grilling techniques and when one of the contestants composed a song that none of the other men wanted to sing.
There are flashes of poignancy as well. Nearly all the contestants are widowers, and one of the most affecting scenes featured Charles L. finally getting closure after his wife's death. He asked one of the other contestants, a doctor, a lingering question he'd had since his wife's brain aneurysm six years earlier. His relief at finally having an answer was visible. "I'm hopeful to find love through this journey," he said. "But you know, in the meantime, I hope I will see a new version of myself."
The Bachelor franchise isn't new to the spectacle of straight men emoting, as phrases like "emotional intelligence," "placing judgment" and "authentic selves" have become more normalized in the show. And I've watched too much reality television to hope I might see an higher-quality version of a property that seems dedicated to shooting itself in the foot. I remain as certain that at least one of these men will break my heart as I am that a shark would take a bite of my liver if given the opportunity. But something still feels different here. It isn't necessarily the substance of these interactions, as funny or as moving as they are, but the artlessness of them. It's hard to believe that men like Charles L. or Jack or Pascal applied to the Golden Bachelorette with any other intentions than potentially kissing a pretty woman. There's an apparent simplicity to these men, a lack of posturing that I find entirely disarming. Rather than trying to figure out how to deploy the right words to win the girl, they seem to be just winging it. If Joan likes it, all the better.
