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!["The Golden Bachelor" Gerry Turner smiles during "The Women Tell All" special. "The Golden Bachelor" Gerry Turner smiles during "The Women Tell All" special.](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarpe/en/home/entertainment/television/info-2023/how-the-golden-bachelor-changed-tv/_jcr_content/root/container_main/container_body_main/container_body1/container_body_cf/container_image/articlecontentfragment/cfimage.coreimg.50.932.jpeg/content/dam/aarp/entertainment/television/2023/11/1140-the-golden-bachelor-gerry-turner-the-women-tell-all.jpg)
The Golden Bachelor airs its final episode Thursday, Nov. 30, when Gerry Turner, 72, will be forced to choose to give a fateful rose to one of the remaining women on the reality competition show: fitness instructor Leslie, 64, for whom Prince wrote the tune “Sexy Dancer,” or homemaker turned financial services pro Theresa, 69.
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“This is an impossible task,” Turner wailed in the penultimate episode. “If I’d known this would be how much pain I would cause, I would have never taken the first step in this journey!” But the last step will involve the thrill of victory for one woman, the agony of defeat for another, and sweet relief for the guy who finally decided whom he could not live without.
The show has been historic in several ways.
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‘Golden’ injected new blood into the sagging 'Bachelor' TV franchise.
How? By doing something TV seldom does: treating people over 50 as if they were still sexual beings. In fact, in 27 seasons, there was never a female contestant in any of the Bachelor shows over 40, and folks in their 30s were rare. The result: The Golden Bachelor’s sexy sexagenarians and septuagenarians were the talk of TV. Its premiere was the most-watched episode of any ABC series since a 2021 episode of Grey’s Anatomy.
Paying attention to the 50-plus generations was simply good business. ABC’s median viewer is 64, and more than 40 percent of the audience for earlier, youth-centric seasons of The Bachelor was older than 55, according to a YouGov survey. Grownups are the champion TV watchers of America, and they also have a lot more money than younger generations.
It showed that when Hollywood execs get desperate, they can actually get innovative.
After many years when the grownup version of The Bachelor languished in development hell, the suits at last aired it, because strikes by writers and actors left them with few if any new scripted shows for the fall season.
“Ordered as programming to fill the void created by the [Writers Guild of America] strike, The Golden Bachelor helped usher in a new era for the franchise to appeal to a new and underserved demographic of ABC’s audience: adults over 50,” The Hollywood Reporter West Coast TV editor Lesley Goldberg tells AARP.
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