The history of unscripted dating and romance shows is littered with outlandish premises.
For six episodes in 2001, UPN tried out Chains Of Love, in which a “Picker” was challenged to find love with one of the four opposite-sex contestants to whom he was literally chained for days. Fox’s Joe Millionaire (2003) bamboozled bachelorettes who battled to win the heart of Evan Marriott, not knowing what the audience did: that he was not actually wealthy. Married By America (also 2003) kicked off with a live TV event in which viewers got to match couples via phone-in votes; cameras then followed them for an “engagement period,” with relationship experts eliminating one couple per week.
But one needn’t look travel so far back in time to find wild concepts: on Netflix alone, there’s Love Is Blind (get engaged sight unseen); Too Hot To Handle (win money by abstaining from sex with other attractive singles); and Sexy Beasts (is a love connection possible for two people wearing disfiguring special effects makeup or mascot-sized animal masks?). Farmer Wants a Wife may have a title that puts you in mind of a particular dating app and its famously corny ads, but given what else is out there, it’s practically old-fashioned.
Based on a format that first premiered in the U.K. in 2001, Fox’s Farmer Wants a Wife involves finding potential spouses for agricultural professionals. In Wednesday’s premiere, host Jennifer Nettles introduced the season’s four bachelors: 32-year-old horse breeder Ryan Black, of North Carolina; 32-year-old cattle rancher Allen Foster, of Tennessee; 31-year-old cattle and horse rancher Hunter Grayson, of Georgia; and 35-year-old cattle rancher and farmer Landon Heaton, of Oklahoma.
Before shooting began, potential partners had the opportunity to review online profiles and videos of all four men, then choose one to match with; the men then narrowed those prospects down to eight they wanted to meet in person…for 10 minutes at a time. Based on those interactions, each Farmer chooses five Wife candidates to come live on his farm with him, spending six weeks determining which could be his partner for life.
In an interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed this week, executive producer Chris Culvenor described the challenge of finding the titular Farmers, when the ideal stars not only haven’t done TV before, but may not own TVs. Considering their lack of on-camera experience, the Farmers are either naturally charming or have had thorough coaching; they’re all very winning. (I’d love to know whether “cuter than a speckled pup sleeping in the shade of a wagon wheel” is an expression Landon routinely uses in his daily life, or if a producer pitched it to him.)
The most reserved of the Farmers, Allen, admits that he doesn’t always find it easy to express himself in relationships, and a couple of the women in his harem say they can’t get a read on whether he actually likes them. Allen’s new boarders might have an easier time shoveling hay than getting him to open up to them.
Like participants on romance shows ranging from FBoy Island to Married At First Sight, several of the women across all the Farmers’ groups tell us they’re sick of the dating scene and ready to try something different. Exactly how different a life they want isn’t necessarily clear thus far. A show like this requires that a certain kind of woman self-select—like Cassidy Jo, who says she “wants to go back to the good old days,” without specifying what that means to her; staying vague may keep her from immediately alienating half the audience, but it still makes a bad first impression.
How different a life the women can handle will be determined in episodes that weren’t provided to critics. The series premiere ends with each Farmer bringing just one woman, initially, back to the farm for 24 hours of one-on-one time, and the men all seem to be carefully easing their would-be Wives into the new environment.
One of the women ends up probably ruining her brand-new alligator-accent sneakers in hog waste, but the rest are only exposed to horses and dogs; actual farm work—which the season supertease promises the women will eventually be doing—will be the true test of which city folk just don’t get it, so it’s unfortunate that the series premiere doesn’t push them past the sorts of animal interactions they’ve probably already had at a petting zoo.
Apart from the notably charismatic Farmers, the show’s most pleasant surprise is its host, Jennifer Nettles. A lead vocalist in the country act Sugarland, the Georgia-born Nettles is also an accomplished actor, with screen credits including The Righteous Gemstones on TV and Waitress on Broadway. Whereas many dating-show hosts can seem extraneous to the action, restating facts to stretch 28 minutes’ worth of content to the required 43, the enthusiastic Nettles is a joy to watch here. I would blush to admit how many unscripted love affairs I’ve watched come to naught, but when Nettles tells us that an afternoon of speed dating could be life-changing for several show participants, I actually believe her!
The secret truth of dating shows is that they tend to get less interesting as a season progresses: The really messy contestants who make for good TV generally get eliminated, leaving fewer, and duller, people to fill the allotted time.
It’s also unclear from the premiere how much the Farmers will be interacting with each other now that they’ve repaired to their homes in different states; it would be a waste to cast four guys without having them compare notes on their experiences, so maybe they’ll periodically get to hop on a Zoom together. Even if not: With Nettles on board—and the possibility that a self-deluded marketing coordinator may face-plant into a pile of manure—Farmer Wants a Wife just might keep me hooked to see which fillies make it to the final rodeo.
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