Here’s a fun fact: Despite it being the whole entire premise of the series, ABC’s Bachelor and Bachelorette franchise of reality dating programs has produced a shockingly small number of weddings over the years. (The Bachelorette has been slightly better at this than its male-led counterpart, having generated all of 4 actual marriages amongst its leads in 20 years on TV; The Bachelor, by contrast, only has one to its name.) We can now, apparently, add one more pairing to the list, as ABC announced tonight that it’ll be broadcasting The Golden Wedding on January 4, a live TV broadcast showcasing the marriage of Golden Bachelor star Gerry Turner and a woman whose name we’ll be sure to print just as soon as we’re sure we’re far enough down the page for it to not spoil anybody idly clicking through.
Okay, phew.
Anyway, Turner and “winner” Theresa Nist will be getting hitched on 1/4/24, and the whole world is invited; the live broadcast will be the Bachelor franchise’s first televised wedding since 2014, because, as it turns out, throwing human beings into a boozy pressure cooker while dating 40 people at a time isn’t actually a very good way to produce marriages! (Who knew?) But while we can posit our various unhappinesses with The Golden Bachelor’s presentation/premise/entire existence—and while Turner’s own dating life has come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks—that’s not going to stop ABC from shopping the hell out of its big, allegedly heart-warming finale to what’s turned out to be a genuine TV phenomenon.
News of the wedding arrived as part of the finale of The Golden Bachelor itself, where Turner expressed his and Nist’s desires to get married swiftly from a “we don’t have a lot of time to waste” angle. (That’s not us being mean, by the way, that’s a quote from Turner.) We assume the entire ABC apparatus did giddy leaps of joy immediately after, interns racing to find ever new ways to say “fairy tale ending” in the expected deluge of marketing for the January TV/matrimonial event.