What The Golden Bachelor gets right — and wrong — about the love lives of seniors

It was an unusual sight for typical viewers of The Bachelor franchise: Fixing his bow tie and slipping a hearing aid into his ear, 72-year-old Gerry Turner prepared to meet his suitors in a new edition of the popular series, The Golden Bachelor, which is geared toward older people.

Premiering last week on ABC and Citytv, The Golden Bachelor cast 22 women between the ages of 60 and 75 to vie for Turner's heart. The show drew 4.1 million viewers during its premiere episode, according to data from viewership analytics firm Nielsen — up 38 per cent from the most recent premiere episode of The Bachelor.

Golden carried on much like a regular episode of its parent series — there were wacky characters, there was manufactured drama and Turner gave one lucky lady the prized "first impression" rose.

But many of the women, like Turner, were widowed, had grandchildren, were retired. Some had hearing impairments, some had recently lost close friends. They also had a range of feelings about aging: One contestant stepped out of the limo wearing a cropped grey wig and housecoat, and holding a rickety walker, before throwing her props away for comedic effect.

"[I'm] going to be very excited to just see older adults portrayed as being interested in repartnering and new romance and intimacy and sexuality," said Nancy Morrow-Howell, a professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.

But Morrow-Howell, who directs the university's Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging, generally had mixed feelings ahead of seeing the show.

"I'm equally concerned about some things that I think may not help [in] telling a different story, a real story about aging. And that is everybody's going to be active and beautiful. And that's not who we are," she said.

Media depictions of older people tend to fall under two extreme stereotypes, Morrow-Howell said. Older people are portrayed as either frail, slow, silly or irrelevant, or as "super agers" — people who are highly fit and functioning, running marathons and travelling the world.

Indeed, many of the show's contestants fit into the latter mould — pickleball players and world travellers and avid dancers who described themselves as energetic or active.

Older adults are still vastly underrepresented in the media landscape, though they make up a significant proportion of Hollywood's audience.

Recent shows like Grace and Frankie, a comedy that ran for seven seasons and starred Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, as well as romantic comedies like 2015's Hello, My Name is Doris with Sally Field and the Book Club franchise (one of which came out earlier this year) are among the handful of mainstream projects that depict this age group.

While a franchise like The Bachelor is always going to choose contestants who are conventionally attractive and active — this is reality TV, after all — Morrow-Howell said that something different is at stake with a show that portrays older people.

"Right now we are trying to change norms about aging," she said.

"I wish that everybody involved in this show would have been very sensitive to the stereotypes, the narratives [and] how there's efforts to reframe aging in a different way."