HAS As soon as he is old, he is already buried. What was supposed to be a revival of “Bachelor,” this 2000s reality TV show in which a rich, handsome bachelor must find love among twenty suitors, ultimately precipitated its downfall. M6, however, thought it had struck a chord with the “golden” version of the program, which used exactly the same concept, but with candidates thirty to forty years older: the program was a hit in the United States in 2023, why not? Won’t it be with us?
We also believed a little in it: a format already well identified, with codes that have entered popular culture (the famous “rose ceremony” during which the bachelor offers a red flower to those he wants to have close to him), seasoned with a grain of salt of geriatric insolence, all driven by the wave of 2000s nostalgia that has already revived shows from twenty years ago.
Patatras, the cathodic rose withered almost as soon as it bloomed: the first two issues, broadcast on September 18, barely reached a million viewers (repetitions included), but the next two, the following week, did even worse. In the field of television, with intense competition from other screens, we must react quickly: M6 finally decided to stop paying a week earlier than planned, and the last four episodes were broadcast on Wednesday, October 2.
What happened, what didn’t work in France, when the program was such a phenomenon on the other side of the Atlantic that it was renewed in its female version, with “The Golden Bachelorette”? This is probably because the show has preserved a first-rate, fluid and heteronormative aspect that suits the American public much more than the French one. Instead of playing with difference and highlighting the particularities of the older age group, the “Golden Bachelor” tries, on the contrary, to incorporate the old into the codes of the young.
downright painful
We have certainly seen bodies and faces that are generally not very present on the small screen, but which ones? Thin and very feminine women, with makeup, jewelry and low-cut dresses and, for some, undergoing surgery. In short, profiles corresponding to the stereotypes of our beauty canons and as unrepresentative of reality as their younger “angels” and other “Marseillais in Ibiza” are.
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