It’s been a little more than three months since the wedding of Gerry Turner with Theresa Nist, who met on the made-for-TV meat/meet market of The Golden Bachelor. He’s the golden bachelor; she’s the one among the 20-plus women on the show to whom he proposed at the end of the Fall 2023 season and married in January 2024, of course televised.
And on ABC (the network that broadcast the show) today (April 12, 2024) said that the couple (paid by ABC) “exclusively” told ABC that the marriage is over.
Finding love can be hard in the best of circumstances. As the ABC story noted that “The couple was challenged with the realities of being in the public eye after their televised experience.”
My first thought is that I hate the breakup. My second was a quote attributed to the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who was said this in a 1997 Atlantic magazine Q&A:
I believe that the major operating ethic in American society right now, the most universal want and need is to be on TV. I’ve been on TV. I could be on TV all the time if I wanted to. But most people will never get on TV. It has to be a real breakthrough for them. And trouble is, people will do almost anything to get on it. You know, confess to crimes they haven’t committed. You don’t exist unless you’re on TV.
There’s nothing new to The Bachelor or Bachelorette shows that The Dating Game or The Newlywed Game spinoff didn’t try to do in their 1970s way.
Such shows provide social learning that teach viewers — whether intended or not — how to act or not to act, in their own situations. It’s a “guilty pleasure,” Bachelor Nation author Amy Kaufman wrote amid tales of the show’s producers manipulating events and plying alcohol to create the drama.
That can be a good or bad thing for audiences, but also for those who choose to participate. How much privacy are you willing to give up to “exist” on TV, or its online equivalent? How much manipulation of “reality” is ethical for the participants and the public?
Instructive is the story of a Dating Game match from 1971 turned into a marriage that lasted. One secret: “At least we turned down the offer to come on The Newlywed Game,” Calvin Stevens wrote. “By that time we’d had enough.”