That Old Feeling

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ou can fault Age of Love for many things, but having a boring tagline isn’t one of them: Kittens vs. cougars. If that doesn’t snag your attention, then I just don’t know you anymore. Kittens vs. cougars! It sums up everything you need to know about this shallow summer dating show — the concept, the vague offensiveness, the gimmickry. Such a ridiculous tagline can only lead to two camps of potential viewers: Those who will never watch the show, and those who must.

Guess which one I was? Age of Love has been an event in my household every Monday, not because it is a good show. It is decidedly not a good show, and I don’t mean it’s trashy. (Of course it is trashy.) I mean that it is poorly produced, which in the world of dating shows, is a feat as impressive as being the sluttiest Hooters girl. At this point, how can you make a dating show look chintzy and ill-conceived? Well, here are a few suggestions: Start every show with a stupid quote about love, as if you are a high-school student turning in a five-paragraph essay. Hire a host (Mark Consuelos) who looks disturbingly like your bachelor but is a foot shorter than him. For further confusion, make sure they are both named Mark. Call your show some vague phrase with absolutely no resonance — it’s not a pun, not a saying, not even a concept. What is the age of love? What the hell does that mean? (What it means, of course, is that someone decided NOT to call the show Kittens vs. Cougars, and that person needs to be fired.) Throw in meaningless shots of elevators to build tension. And to top it all off, shoot every finale so that everyone looks slathered in Crisco. Forget producers. Is there a makeup artist in the house? Can we get some pressed powder up in this bitch?

The concept of Age of Love is that Australian tennis pro Mark Philippoussis (we’ll call him Mark, because we have no choice) is dating two groups of women: One is hot and twentysomething, while the other is hot and fortysomething. In the premiere, each older woman strutted out onto a windswept balcony and announced her age to him as if it were a government secret. "I was born in 1967, and that makes me . . . forty." Cut to Mark’s bulging eyes, add a hard swallow sound. You get the sense producers were a bit disappointed that smoke never came out of his ears and his eyeballs never fell out of their sockets. These are not your mother’s fortysomethings, however; these are the Demi Moores and Madonnas of suburban Ohio and Dallas. Only one of them, an attractive forty-eight year old named Jen, looks tweaked by plastic surgery. And good lord: She is forty-eight. It’s hard not to marvel at her spectacular, sculpted body, even if her forehead is slightly frozen by Botox. But just as we are appreciating how well-preserved these women are, the show cuts — hilariously! — to the group of ditzy twentysomethings, who are biding their time in the apartment by hula-hooping in string bikinis. Cue breathless narration: Does age matter? Who will win his heart? Find out, this season on Age of Love.

This is one of those false dilemmas that dating shows adore. For love or money? For brains or for looks? The premise was a shock to Mark, who, in the parlance of these things, "thought he had signed up for a regular dating show." (He was wrong!) As our bachelor, Mark is just about what you would expect: He is flat, and generically good-looking, and somewhat baffled by the attention and jealousy and pansexual pleasures of his situation. Meh, seems like a nice enough guy. The drama of the show, and its minor success, exists in the women themselves.

Ah yes, the kittens. The cougars! The twentysomethings are cast with the kind of eye for dumb beauty you might expect at a Lakers Girl audition. They seem good-hearted, and dim, with jugs big and hard as boulders. There’s bubbly, twenty-three-year-old peroxide-blonde Tessa, who tells us, "I have great thoughts. And I need an intellectual challenge." There’s Megan, a twenty-one-year-old sparkly-eyed college girl who looks like she should be taking your order at Tasti D-Lite. There’s Amanda, who actually was some kind of sports-franchise dancer, although her online bio insists on referring to her as an "assistant to a financial planner." And there’s Mary, who cries more than a crack baby. Mary was booted off the show last week, which is a shame, because her crying jags were the show’s funniest punchlines. She was coming unglued — and, literally, so were her fake eyelashes.

By contrast, the fortysomethings seem confident and grounded. They tout their emotional maturity and talk a big game about professional triumphs. (What these "professional triumphs" are remain vague. One woman just got her real-estate license. Jen, the forty-eight-year-old knockout, is a personal assistant. This is fine, but if you’re gonna burn the young’uns, you gotta bring some matches.) It’s a comforting thought that even as our bodies sag, our self-esteem might rise. And it’s nice to see women in their forties being sexual. Yes, it’s cringe-worthy when forty-eight-year-old Jen asks Mark to kiss her, as if she’s standing under the glitter rainbow at prom, but in the next episode, when she’s straddling him in a biker bar, it’s like: Damn, girl got moves. There are moments when I find myself thinking that these fortysomethings might actually have their shit together.

That is, until they get kicked off the show. Then they collapse into tears and some of the most heartrending dialogue this side of Lifetime. "My grandmother tells me every day that she hopes she lives long enough to see me married," said Lynn when she was eliminated. "I hope she gets her wish." Agh! Right to the ol’ ticker! "You know, I’m forty years old. I’ve had my heart broken before. The thing is that at my age, it just seems like that time period is getting a little bit shorter," said Angela, breaking into tears. When is Diane Keaton going to get her hands on lines like this?

And then there is Maria, a resplendent, vivacious forty-two-year-old photographer. She almost made dating-show history, when she announced she was going to leave the show because she had no chemistry with Mark. It was as though someone had punched through the shiny, ridiculous façade and actually said something that made sense. I’ve seen women kicked off dating shows, and I’ve even seen them remove themselves voluntarily. (Buckwild memorably left Flavor of Love because she feared she might violate her parole.) But I’d never seen a woman leave for the outrageously reasonable excuse that the guy wasn’t really worth it. It just made such sense.

But then, after bragging repeatedly about her intention to bail, Maria let herself be sweet-talked into staying. And, as if this weren’t embarrassing enough, the whole thing happened again two weeks later. "I’m the sucker of the show right now," Maria said, after Mark talked her (once again) into staying. All of which points to a sad truth about Age of Love: No matter their birthdays, these women do have one important thing in common. They were all stupid enough to come on this show.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Sarah Hepola has been a high-school teacher, a playwright, a film critic, a music editor and a travel columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Salon, and on NPR. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.