What to expect from the CW’s latest international import? Farmer Wants a Wife, the Bachelor-meets-bumpkin reality dating show premiered last night, and I’ll admit my excitement was tempered by a bit of Bachelor-esque ennui. Yes, I religiously watch everything from America’s Next Top Model to Supernanny (love Jo!). But the one “reality” show I stopped watching years ago was The Bachelor. (It just hasn’t been the same since Jerry O’Connell’s brother handed out the roses.)
I expected a similar, cheesy set-up from Farmer Wants a Wife: a vaguely sexy Farmer-hero (check); a bevy of cute-to-psychotic amorous ladies (check); a farm (check) and a ridiculous goodbye-ceremony (holy hen cages, double-check with a gold star!). We even get some local color, when a diner patron tells the cameras, “I think city girls are wild up front. Country girls are wild in the back.” Yee-haw!
I did not expect to be charmed by the ladies. The show begins with Matt, aka The Farmer, a 29-year-old college grad and grain farmer in Portage Des Sioux, Missouri. With his bristle-brush blond hair, six-pack abs and entirely non-Farmer’s-tan tan, he’s not bad on the eyes. He says he’s willing to do the show because, despite his abs, wifely pickings are slim in a town with a population of 351 people.
I don’t know if I totally buy that he rides his tractor shirtless 24-7, but his grand half-naked entrance made all the ladies swoon. (That, or the heat.)
The young ladies, who range in age, hometowns, and heel heights, are all city-dwellers who say chivalry in the city is dead. Living in New York, it’s hard not to feel empathetic – though don’t we all think the grass is greener on the other side of the Hudson? My friends in San Francisco envy my friends in Ohio who envy my friends in D.C. who think the Chicago girls have it easy, who then say New York is where the men must be…It’s easy to understand why a girl might finally say, “I give up! I will gladly huck and muck and milk cows for the rest of my life, if I can also find true love.” I’m sure being on the TV show didn’t hurt, but still…
The girls are flown in small planes to a rural airstrip, where they totter around in ridiculous heels and glare silently at each other, and the expansive, prairie landscape. They’re driven, via schoolbus, to a borrowed farmstead where we first see the Farmer…shirtless, tan, serious and chivalrous, racing his tractor towards them. And that is truly when the girls lose their shit. He carries one off the bus and she nearly swoons. Brooke, 23 and from Texas, is basically in love by the end of the show. Kanisha, or KJ, 25 and from California says, “When I look in his eyes I travel out to space.”
The girls’ first challenge is to catch and cage chickens, which somehow seems easier than the evil masterminds behind the show probably had hoped. There are no cat fights in dirt clouds, though we do see an abundance of Daisy Dukes. L.A. girl Stephanie, 23, is the only girl who steps in cow shit. She’s also the only girl who is terrified of chickens: “Oh my god. I’ve never a seen a chicken. I’m afraid of them like pecking my eyes out. Because…I want to see. And I like seeing things. And I definitely need my eyes!”
True dat.
Kanisha wins immunity, and then the Matt takes the girls on a hayride…where they actually seem to talk. And listen to each other. It was like the reality universe had turned upon itself, and I couldn’t tell up from down from east from west. Did everyone like each other? Did everyone except Stephanie not mind the hay ride? Would someone actually find love? And then Josie started talking.
We’d already been introduced to the 25-year-old from Laguna Niguel, California (“My name is Josie. I think of myself as a ten-plus. That’s part of being Republican.”). But on the hay ride she lets it all loose, and the girls find a common enemy. (And my reality show-equilibrium returns!):
“I am a winner and I think like a winner, like George Bush says. I’m a goal-digger, G-O-A-L. I think that world might be coming to an end. And the Jews, the Christians, and the Catholics, we all are one and we have to stick together and fight.”
And speaking of fighting, “I fight for men like they do in the Middle East. Before somebody blows me up, I blow them up.” She is either an actress of the highest caliber, or a completely delusional young woman. Either way, you know the producers are keeping her around.
The one person I don’t buy in all of this is the Farmer himself. Matt comes off as the Ryan Seacrest of farmers. He’s too slick; he doesn’t stutter when he speaks; and he seems completely at ease hosting this gaggle of girls while the cameras run. (Also, he repeatedly says, “Let’s roll.”) Maybe it’s because he’s dreamed of such an opportunity for so long (word on the street is he previously had applied to be a contestant on The Bachelor). But he came off as eerily camera-ready. And not that interested in the girls.
Maybe it was just Hooksexups. On his private date with Christa, he hand-made her mint juleps and they then sat on a swing and …talked? Christa giggled at every word he said, and obviously wanted to suck face. He gently pecked her. I didn’t know straight dudes who weren’t Southern or metrosexual hand-crushed fresh mint. Or maybe I’ve been citified so long I don’t recognize chivalry when it refuses to make out with my drunk ass, and then walks me to my doorstep.
By now I was snoozing through the show (virgins toilet paper a truck, fights break out, etc.), but then came the Goodbye Ceremony! Oh lord, the complicated goodbye ceremony! First the girls were instructed to stand by posts, upon which chickens in cages were perched. Then Matt went around to remove all the cages (thankfully, this process was edited out). Then the girls had to lift their chickens, root around in the nest, and find an egg. No egg? You’re out!
Stephanie was booted. As Matt said, “Miss Stephanie had a lot of City in her.” The eye-rolling that resulted from Josie staying on the show could have powered a farmhouse’s generator…but surprisingly, Matt said he had a good reason to keep Josie around. No, he didn’t want to sleep with her. But she did bring out other sides of the girls that he wouldn’t have otherwise seen. That, and there is no way the producers are letting her go so easily.
Until next time, let’s roll (in the hay)!
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