We Should Have Seen the Ending of The Golden Bachelor Coming

Gerry Turner was supposed to be different. As the inaugural Golden Bachelor, age 72, he was nearly half a century older than the typical crop of man-children that has graced ABC’s marquee reality show each year for the past two decades. Not only was Gerry of an advanced age, but he was straight out of central casting—handsome, humble, adventurous, and well-mannered.

We know The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. We know the formula and the motifs: The lead falls for multiple people and breaks the heart of all but one. The runner-up is all but forced to get dolled up in expensive clothes and give a speech about how in love they are with the star of the show, right before they are told that they have not been chosen, on national television. The Bachelor is a game show that claims to be about love but is really about cruel, for-your-amusement drama.

But a new, refreshing variable—age—was thrown into the mix, and suddenly we started wondering how else the show we’ve come to know, the show we’ve come to love, the show we’ve come to despise might finally change. For viewers, the hope of The Golden Bachelor was that this cast of senior citizens might somehow be purer and wiser than their forebears, who had been mostly in their 20s. Gerry was on an honest-to-goodness pursuit of love, not Instagram followers, and gosh, wouldn’t that be enough to defy the laws of reality TV?

But by the end of the show, it was clear that golden was just an adjective, a descriptor for what Gerry always was, fundamentally: a leading man on The Bachelor.

Yes, age is more than a number. In many ways, Gerry wasn’t typical Bachelor material. He’s a widow, he sports hearing aids, he has two grown daughters and two grandchildren, and he’s not super great at driving in the dark. (Who among us is?) His gosh-golly-gee-whillikers innocence and Midwestern everyman appeal was somehow never irritating or grandfatherly, merely endearing. His story of love and loss was both captivating and genuinely very different from what we typically see on this show: He was with his wife, Toni, for 43 years until she died in 2017 from a bacterial infection. He remembers Toni with so much love and respect that he still talks to her for advice. Of course we were rooting for the guy.

But then, Gerry couldn’t make up his mind between two women, Theresa and Leslie, until the bitter end. Leslie’s eventual heartbreak felt all the more real not because the pair was older than the average reality show duo but because Gerry was so successful at building her up, in leading her on. Since the show’s conclusion, Leslie has divulged that Gerry wrote checks he couldn’t cash, making plans for the future with her during their fantasy suite date, promising that just after filming wrapped they’d be able to start their life together. When he finally broke off the relationship in order to propose to Theresa, Gerry caught Leslie so flat-footed, embarrassed, and angry that the season finale was among the most bleakly uncomfortable hours of television—reality or otherwise—I’ve ever seen.

While this might have really been the most dramatic finale yet, what Gerry did is a classic Bachelor move. The blow wasn’t blunted by his years of experience; if anything, it was sharpened by the assumption that self-aware and sensitive Gerry, of all people, should’ve known better. Gerry donned the masque of the Bachelor and couldn’t see through it any better than younger men have.

The very conceit of the Bachelor franchise is a contemporary form of torture: Let one man or woman date a dozen-plus people at the same time and gradually whittle down the ranks until there’s one lucky suitor left. It’s a battle royal for roses. The show demands a monogamous conclusion to a polyamorous journey, an intentionally cruel exploration of love-addled hubris that’d make Greek tragedians blush. We were not treated to—or promised—a season of a sweet old man making his way through OkCupid coffee dates and dinner setups. Instead, Gerry was presented with a smorgasbord of lovers and told he could look at all of them, could closely inspect a few, but ultimately must choose only one. (Oh, and the whole time, he can talk only to cameras, not his friends, about what’s happening.) Tragedy is inevitable. The choice between the last few contestants is where the true suspense and drama comes in. Obviously: It’s a TV show. It is primarily concerned not with people’s lives, but with entertaining.

But sometimes—often!—in this franchise, things really go off the rails, as they did with Gerry. Let’s see here. There was real estate agent Jason Mesnick, who proposed to Melissa Rycroft before changing his mind and ditching her for runner-up Molly Malaney during the season finale. (The two were married in 2010, had a child, and are still together.) Then, there was software salesman Ben Higgins, who broke the sacred seal by telling both finalists, Lauren Bushnell and JoJo Fletcher, he loved them, before breaking up with JoJo and proposing to Lauren. (The pair broke off their engagement after two years. And it is now pretty common for the show’s stars to tell two contestants “I love you.”) There was also auto-racing scion Arie Luyendyk Jr., who proposed to Becca Kufrin, admitted he was still in love with runner-up Lauren Burnham, broke off his engagement to Kufrin, and proposed to Burnham. (They got married in 2019 and have three kids.) Oh, and there was pilot Peter Weber, who proposed to Hannah Ann Sluss after runner-up Madison Prewett quit the show, but then broke off the engagement with Sluss to pursue a relationship with Prewett. (They dated for three days.)

Gerry’s age and general good nature could not spare him from the typical Bachelor fate (though we can still hope that his marriage to Theresa, which will begin with a nationally televised wedding Jan. 4, is happy and lasting). The reality is that he is part of a long line of dudes who have messed everything up for someone on the show who deserved better. But that doesn’t mean that disastrously, publicly failing to choose and doing an awkward 180 is inevitable on this show—bachelorettes break hearts, but they basically never do their suitors dirty quite like this. All the more reason to root for Leslie to get her turn at leading the show.