As the Golden Bachelor, Gerry Turner, says “I do” to fiancée Theresa Nist — live on ABC’s “The Golden Wedding” special on Thursday — we can’t help but think of the reality stars who came before them, committing to a lifetime of togetherness in front of a viewing audience.
‘The Golden Wedding’ countdown
The 72-year-old retired restaurateur and the 70-year-old financial services professional, who both lost longtime spouses, will marry on Jan. 4 during a live, televised ceremony. They’ve said it will be a family affair, with their children and grandchildren filling their wedding party. They’ve talked about what they’ll wear, who will officiate (former contestant Susan Noles), who’s on the guest list (all The Golden Bachelor contestants scored invites), how they’ll honor their former spouses and the music at the reception. Their honeymoon will be a trip to Italy, courtesy of ABC.
Why the wedding is a big deal for the franchise
It’s been a decade since ABC devoted an entire special to the nuptials of a Bachelor Nation couple. The last was Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici’s nuptials in 2014, which failed to drive big ratings. Since then, weddings have been featured within episodes of Bachelor in Paradise and in “The Bachelor at 20: A Celebration of Love” special in 2016. They haven’t been stand-alone events like this.
What’s going for this wedding is that viewers liked this new iteration of the franchise, which showed Turner looking for love with an over-60 set. The Golden Bachelor’s Nov. 30 finale had the best ratings for any show in the franchise since March 2020. That was one year before former host Chris Harrison stepped away from the show and was replaced by Bachelor alum Jesse Palmer, resulting in some brand rebuilding. ABC seems invested, as it’s going heavy on promoting it.
“It’s been a while since the Bachelor has had a wedding,” Syracuse University’s Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture and trustee professor at Newhouse School of Public Communications, tells Yahoo. “It’s going to be live. It’s being promoted a lot. [Plus], the series itself had a lot of interest. So I think many of the people who sat through that entire series, which was a substantial audience, are probably now go to the wedding.”
A history of TV weddings
People love weddings, especially ones for which they don’t have to get dressed up or buy a gift. For many years, scripted TV weddings — on daytime and primetime — have drawn massive audiences and have resulted in some of television’s most memorable moments. (See: “I, Ross, take thee, Rachel.”)
So have some unscripted weddings: The real-life nuptials of royals — beginning in 1956 when actress Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier III of Monaco was televised by MGM to 30 million people worldwide in a deal to terminate her film contract — have been must-see TV. That’s especially been the case for the British royals, like Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer’s 1981 wedding, which was watched by 750 million worldwide. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 2018 wedding drew 29 million American viewers — more watchers than for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s ceremony in 2011.
The explosion of reality TV in the early 2000s took the TV wedding in a completely new direction. We’ll point back to 2000 when Fox aired a two-hour special, “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?,” during which two strangers, Rick Rockwell and nurse Darva Conger, were married on the spot. It was a train wreck on many levels, with the marriage almost immediately being annulled. However, it drew over 23 million viewers domestically — and an insane amount of press — setting off lightbulbs for TV execs, who went on to spin countless ideas for wedding and dating competition shows. (RIP: Who Wants to Marry My Dad?, Married By America, For Love or Money, Temptation Island, The Flavor of Love and the original Joe Millionaire.)
The most successful iteration has been The Bachelor, which hit the airwaves in 2002. The ABC show gave contestants more time to get to know each other — and roses! — with the added bonus that they weren’t forced to marry someone at the end. The original Bachelorette, Miami Heat dancer Trista Rehn, was the first to take the plunge, marrying firefighter and poet Ryan Sutter in 2003. The pair you couldn’t help but root for — still married today — received $1 million to exchange vows on TV in a three-episode special culminating in a live wedding, which drew 26 million viewers.
It was several years before a Bachelor followed suit — when single dad Jason Mesnick married runner-up Molly Malaney. The couple, also still together, married in 2010, and their pretaped wedding special aired on the network the next month, drawing 17 million viewers.
The Bachelorette’s Ashley Hebert also had a splashy TV wedding, which was also taped for a special, when she married J.P. Rosenbaum in 2012. Four million viewers tuned in to see the since-divorced pair exchange vows. The Bachelor’s Lowe and Giudici also had a pretaped special two years later, and while ratings were higher (6.2 million viewers) for the still-together couple, they were still low, and it was the end of entire specials around weddings.
In the years since — as TV viewing audiences have splintered further due to streaming — weddings have been shown within episodes and specials. When Bachelor in Paradise’s still-together Tanner Tolbert and Jade Roper married in 2016, it was part of “The Bachelor at 20: A Celebration of Love,” which aired on ABC. Bachelor in Paradise also incorporated parts of the weddings of now exes Marcus Grodd and Lacy Faddoul, Carly Waddell and Evan Bass and Chris Randone and Krystal Nielson into the show.
Outside Bachelor Nation, Survivor contestants Rob Mariano and Amber Brkich also had a big, splashy TV wedding on CBS in 2005. It aired as a two-hour, pretaped special and brought in 9.6 million viewers — with the couple living happily ever after.
Parallel to this are the celebrities with reality shows who married on TV. The biggies include: Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey (MTV’s Newlyweds, 2003), Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro (MTV’s Til Death Do Us Part: Carmen + Dave, 2004), Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt (MTV’s The Hills, 2006), Kendra Wilkinson and Hank Baskett (E!’s Kendra, 2009) and La La and Carmelo Anthony (VH1’s La La’s Full Court Wedding, 2011). For those keeping track at home, they all split — minus Speidi. Lachey was remarried to Vanessa Minnillo in 2010, and their nuptials aired in another special for TLC ... and he is now the host of Netflix’s Love Is Blind.
Like many of the others, the Kardashians have an iffy record in TV weddings, including Khloé and Lamar Odom (2009) and Kim and Kris Humphries (2011), which is why Kim didn’t want to televise her vow exchange with Kanye West (2014), though she shared everything leading up to and after the ceremony. We’re holding out hope for Kourtney and Travis Barker, whose 2022 Italian nuptials streamed on Hulu last year.
Housewives stars Bethenny Frankel, Kim Zolciak and NeNe Leakes all brided it up on Bravo in 2010, 2011 and 2013, respectively — ditto for some Vanderpump Rules pairs. There have been more Duggar wedding specials than we can count — though now not on TLC’s dime.
The whole reality TV wedding craze also led to the rise of reality shows like Say Yes to the Dress, My Fabulous Wedding, Married at First Sight, Married Away and Bridezillas.
Why TV weddings resonate with viewers
Across cultures, weddings are something people can identify with, says Thompson. Even when a wedding is not on TV, there’s something theatrical about them. They’re mini productions — with a set, a wardrobe, attendants, planners and cameras. They’re also dramatic. Not only is a person going from engaged to married in a matter of two words (“I do”), but at what other event is there, at least historically, the option to “speak now or forever hold your peace?
“Weddings are perfectly matched for TV,” he says, “and we cannot resist them.”
When it comes to The Bachelor, viewers have “sat through these show courtships,” he says. “So it’s really like going to the wedding of someone — in many ways, oddly enough — that you know more intimately than even a friend’s wedding. Generally, when you go to a friend’s wedding, you haven’t been privy to intimate conversations they’ve had with their fiancée when they are by themselves, which we get constantly with these people [on the show].”
For better or worse, a connection is made to the couple we see onscreen.
“By the time Trista and Ryan got married on The Bachelorette, we felt like we knew them,” says Thompson. “We had gone through the journey with them. That’s also the case for Survivor’s Rob and Amber, The Kardashians, the Real Housewives and the rest of the Bachelor weddings.”
He continues, “I think that is true to an extent with the Golden Bachelor. He’s got big ratings, the highest for the series in several seasons, and then after the final episode, we get the invitation to watch the wedding. In many ways, courtship is the perfect subject for reality TV. And TV weddings are the perfect dramatic culmination of that.”
‘The Golden Wedding’ airs Jan. 4 on ABC at 8 p.m. ET.
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