I just want Joan to know that everyone at the Spritzler Report is rooting for you.
BTW after over 30 seasons of the Bachelor guess who many couples are still together. Five! Shocker. Here are the grim details.
The First ‘Golden Bachelorette’ Knows ‘It’s a Weird Way to Meet Somebody’
Joan Vassos, a 61-year-old school administrator and grandmother, didn’t find love on “The Golden Bachelor.” She’ll give it another try as the star of ABC’s new spinoff.
“Everybody was like, ‘Yeah, this is going to be really embarrassing, but you go right ahead and do it,’” said Ms. Vassos, whose husband died in 2021. “‘You deserve to find love.’”Credit...Jennelle Fong for The New York Times
By Callie Holtermann
Sept. 13, 2024
There was good news and bad news for Joan Vassos, ABC’s newly minted “Golden Bachelorette.”
The good news was that the network had gathered two dozen suitors it thought she might like. Producers planned to put her up in a California mansion and send her on dates beneath the Eiffel Tower (the one in Las Vegas, but still).
The bad news was that ABC had tried this before.
“The Golden Bachelor,” a retirement-age spinoff of the network’s dating franchise, premiered to good buzz and even better ratings last year. Then it went haywire. Its lead, Gerry Turner, married his pick, Theresa Nist, and announced their divorce in roughly the span of a fiscal quarter.
So, what would it be? Was the possibility of finding love worth the trouble of inheriting a wobbly reality TV franchise? Was she interested in being the show’s star as well as its cleanup crew?
Ms. Vassos, a 61-year-old grandmother of three, was game for the challenge.
“I know that it’s a weird way to meet somebody,” she said on a video call from her home in Rockville, Md. “I get all that, and I consider myself not a naïve person.”
Ms. Vassos had returned three days earlier from filming the show, which premieres on Sept. 18. She had gone back to work that morning in fund-raising and alumni relations at the Landon School, a private school in Bethesda.
Ms. Vassos was aware, too, that a majority of the couples from the franchise’s two decades on air had not stayed together. But she said she followed its success stories on Instagram, watching former cast members marry and have children.
“Everybody was like, ‘Yeah, this is going to be really embarrassing, but you go right ahead and do it,’” she said. “‘You deserve to find love.’”
Ms. Vassos entered the “Bachelor” multiverse as a contestant on Mr. Turner’s season, feeling hopeful at the prospect of dating again after the death of her husband, John Vassos, in 2021. She left midseason to support her daughter, who was struggling in the aftermath of a difficult birth.
In April, producers asked her to lead a follow-up season. Yes, she was excited to browse ABC’s catalog of age-appropriate bachelors with moving life stories and staggeringly good hair. But she also saw the show as a chance to buck the expectation that women in their 60s and older simply cater to the needs of everybody else.
“When we’re this age, people expect us to take a back seat now,” she said. “A lot of us feel like we’re still kind of young, and that we’re not ready to take that back seat yet.”
Ms. Vassos grew up in Olney, Md., with her mother, a nurse, her father, an electrical engineer for NASA, and one younger brother. After high school she majored in computer science at the University of Maryland, often the only woman in a computer lab full of men.
She met John the summer before her junior year at a bar in Ocean City, Md. It was a case of opposites attracting: She was a wallflower and a “math nerd,” while he was gregarious and larger-than-life. They married in 1988, when Ms. Vassos was 25.
John took over his father’s business selling office equipment, and Ms. Vassos worked writing code for AT&T. The couple had four children — Nick, Erica, Ally and Luke — and settled into a busy, happy existence crammed with Costco runs and football games.
Nick Vassos, now 34, remembers his mother waking up at 2 a.m. to drive him to faraway wrestling tournaments. She still has a full life, and she’s still the glue that binds the family together, he added in an interview: “The one thing she’s missing is that companion.”
In February 2018, John said he was not feeling well enough to travel to Wisconsin for one of his son Luke’s college lacrosse games. A scan showed a mass on his pancreas. He was diagnosed with cancer on Valentine’s Day.
“I kept saying, ‘He’s going to make it,’” Ms. Vassos said. “‘He’s strong, he’s young, he can do it.’” For two years, they tried chemotherapy and radiation. One day John, too weak to stand, called his wife over to the sofa and told her that he hoped she would eventually look for another partner.
He died three days later, at age 59. “Now I get up on a Saturday morning and it’s so quiet,” Ms. Vassos said.
It took about two years for Ms. Vassos to feel comfortable trying to date again. But her friends didn’t have anyone to set her up with, and she found that men were not being particularly truthful in their profiles on dating apps. She felt especially discouraged at dinner with a friend last year, when she looked across the bar and assumed that every man around her age was married.
The men who will court Ms. Vassos on “The Golden Bachelorette” include a chiropractor, several retirees and an Elvis superfan.Credit...ABC
That night, Ms. Vassos saw a casting call on TV for a “Bachelor” spinoff that would feature contestants 60 and up. She was a longtime viewer of the franchise, whose contestants are typically budding influencers in their 20s and 30s.
She filled out the application on her phone, making several typos. She got a call from the casting team a month later.
“The Golden Bachelor” was a ratings hit, drawing an average of nearly six million viewers per episode on ABC, compared with less than four million for the previous “Bachelor” season, according to Nielsen. Viewers praised conversations like the one that Ms. Vassos had with Mr. Turner on a candlelit date, about the mixture of hope and pain that comes with trying to date again after losing a spouse.
But good will sagged later in the season, when an article in the Hollywood Reporter claimed that Mr. Turner had misrepresented his romantic history. (Mr. Turner called the story “fully fictitious.”) Then came Mr. Turner’s quickie marriage and divorce to Ms. Nist.
Ms. Vassos said she did not fault the couple for the dissolution of their marriage. And yet: “I did feel like it put a little pressure on this show,” she said. “It doesn’t have to have an epic ending, but it has to really be true to the process of finding a real love.”
When producers began discussing the casting of their first “Golden Bachelorette” late last year, Ms. Vassos was an early candidate. “She has all the qualities we hoped for: inner and outer beauty, warmth, and a deep commitment to family and loved ones,” Jacqui Pitman, a casting director for the show, wrote in an email.
But when Ms. Vassos was announced as the lead in May, she found herself at the center of a debate over what version of aging the “Golden” franchise would choose to portray.
At 61, Ms. Vassos is more than a decade younger than Mr. Turner was at the start of his season. An article in Slate argued that Ms. Vassos was too young to lead a franchise that purported to celebrate the realities of aging.
“Appearing youthful is still going to be the currency of the franchise, even if it’s the ‘Golden’ franchise,” said Natasha Scott-Reichel, a co-host of “2 Black Girls, 1 Rose” a podcast about reality dating shows. Still, she and her co-host, Justine Kay, said they were happy the franchise had branched out into older cast members at all.
“I’m rooting for Joan,” Ms. Scott-Reichel added.
Ms. Vassos, hands clasped and basking in the sun, stands in front of a wall outside with a geometric pattern. The hills of Los Angeles and trunks of palm trees serve as the backdrop.
Ms. Vassos in Los Angeles. She has spent the past few weeks doing a swirl of promotional appearances for the show — a sharp contrast from her day job in fundraising for a private school in Maryland.Credit...Jennelle Fong for The New York Times
Ms. Vassos has spent the past few weeks in a whirlwind of promotion. She is on billboards and TikTok and the cover of Entertainment Weekly, sipping from a “World’s Sexiest Grandma” mug.
Although the franchise tends to play up sex appeal, Ms. Vassos said she was looking for someone emotionally vulnerable with whom she has a gut-level connection. Her son Nick added that he expected that only the smartest of men would impress her.
“She likes to be challenged, and I think that’s what she’s looking for,” he said.
Ms. Vassos has wondered what her late husband would think of her unexpected foray into dating onscreen. When deciding whether to compete on “The Golden Bachelor,” she told a friend that she felt guilty — she worried that competing on the show might make people doubt her devotion.
The friend reminded her that John had loved her, and that he had also loved reality TV. “She was like, ‘He’s up there saying to everybody: Look it, that’s my wife down there, that’s my wife!’”
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