‘Farmer Wants a Wife’ Is a Rare Gem Among Silly-Sounding Dating Shows
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.