Let’s start with the name: Farmer Wants a Wife. The Bachelor-style Fox reality competition that ended just a few weeks ago is not technically about farmers or their particular wants.
The premise of the series — landing auspiciously amid our heated national debate over the growing urban-rural divide, family formation, declining birthrates, and “what it means to be a man today” — is that a group of 32 “city” women has tired of the hustle and bustle of modernity. They thus divide themselves among and compete for the affection of four “farmers” looking for a good woman to start a family with on the lonesome frontier, or what passes for it in 2023.
Except the “farmers” aren’t really farmers, insomuch as they (mostly) don’t raise crops. Three of the four are cattle or horse ranchers, family farming having been all but obliterated as a going concern around the time PBS’s An American Family pioneered reality TV in the early 1970s. And the “big city” girls stretch the term’s definition to the breaking point, one finalist being from Fortson, Georgia, a locality that, whatever its charms, boasts a population of less than 9,000. Finally, the competition each woman faces for her “farmer’s” affections implies that their particular “wants” are the ones struggling to be fulfilled.
Rather than phony, this is what makes Farmer Wants a Wife fascinating in its way. The show is less about a clash and reconciliation of competing cultural sensibilities than a competition to embody an imagined archetype of the “heartland” best. The show isn’t a battle of the sexes or a town-vs.-gown The Simple Life-style satire, but rather a real-time attempt of a group of under-40s to fumble toward Americana nirvana. Or at least its commoditized equivalent.
“He’s a gentleman,” one contestant says in the typically nonspecific fashion of the babyfaced Oklahoman Landon Heaton in the show’s first episode. “That’s hard to come by in Orlando.”
Unfortunately, this does not exactly make for riveting television, much less sublime train-wreck material of the Real Housewives variety. Everyone is very … nice. The closest thing the show has to a heel is Ryan Black, one of the four central not-farmers (and the only African American one) whose aw-shucks demeanor masks a repeatedly demonstrated eagerness to get some, uh, “alone time” with as many of the contestants as possible. Poor Jennifer Nettles, the Sugarland vocalist moonlighting as the show’s host, has essentially nothing to do, reduced to a country-fried voice-over impresario ushering in the series’s cliffhangers and commercial breaks.
Over the course of the series’s 11 episodes, the four central bachelor “farmers” whittle down their would-be harems by way of various activities meant to measure their readiness for life on the far — ah, I mean ranch, from the time-honored and in no way symbolic ritual of bull castration to a demolition derby that features an awesomely bombastic display of patriotic fervor. The four men might not be the “competitors,” but they are surely fighting for their lives. They persistently complain to the confessional about how hard it is to sift through and manage the ambitions of eight beautiful women, lest the viewer believe they’re having too much fun.
The men are worth considering in the archetypal masculinity they each embody, almost surely on purpose: There’s Ryan, the sly ladies’ man; Landon, the blond and clean-cut aspiring father; Hunter, whose indecipherable good-old-boy accent and mien recall a Mike Judge creation; and Allen, a divorcee whose formidable mustache and repeatedly demonstrated reticence to talk about feelings make him the unofficial representative of Traditional Man™.
Given the third degree by one contestant with amusingly retrograde views on divorce (“Did you try?”), Allen, looking for all the world like an elementary-school delinquent hauled in front of the principal, cycles seemingly at random through a series of cliches (“It takes two,” “life somehow got in the middle”) before defiantly staring back at her in nonverbal resignation. The likes of Larry McMurtry, Charles Portis, and Sam Shepard have all attempted to demystify the alienated post-modern cowboy; none have fully succeeded in explaining him. With apologies to the former Miss Arizona Cassidy Jo Jacks, she didn’t stand a chance.
So if between Allen’s cowboy grimace, Ryan’s seducer’s tongue, Landon’s annihilating earnestness, and Hunter’s alien patois, we’re not getting a whole lot of exposition from the cowboys, who here is actually talking about what they want? It is, of course, the women, and they speak loudly and with one voice: They’re done with the Orlando boys and want men, specifically to father and provide moral instruction to maybe not lots, but at least 2.5 babies.
There’s an element of self-selection when it comes to the kind of person who is going to volunteer to appear on a show called Farmer Wants a Wife. But it’s worth taking the show’s central dynamic as emblematic of American macroconditions: The women on this show are at least quasi-urban professionals. There’s a cybersecurity analyst, a real estate investor, and a communications flack, all of whom want to form families and, for whatever reason, see their best option as, quite literally, rejecting modernity and turning to tradition.
Except it’s not quite that simple. What should be the show’s sociological climax lands instead with a dull thud. In the episodes leading up to the finale, the men visit their remaining suitors’ hometowns, intent on winning over their friends and family. It seems like a dramaturgical layup: The tables are turned on the cowboys, who now have to convince a cadre of slick suburbanites and city-dwellers that their fair daughters will be in good hands amid the Georgia dirt or Oklahoma-red clay.
Instead, over two excruciatingly boring hours of television, the men lazily bat reality-TV cliches back and forth with their opponent-collaborators: “Do you love my daughter?” “Wow, that’s a heavy question,” and so on and so forth. There’s no culture clash because almost all of the show’s contestants already embody the “alternate lifestyle” its central cowboys are proposing they marry into. They’re as much “farmers” as the rancher men are, inasmuch as being a “farmer” in 2023 means signing up for a slate of cultural values that place the nuclear family at the center of private, spiritual, and civic life. Growing corn might be the province of Monsanto, but anyone can walk into their nearest Walmart and buy a pair of Wranglers.
So the cultural iconography of the agrarian replaces its real-life equivalent, which is mirrored by the totally unaffected nature with which the show’s contestants bat around the aforementioned reality cliches. When Khelsi, Allen’s ultimate choice for a partner, turns to the camera during the show’s finale and, with heartbreaking sincerity, says, “I believe in true love. I think it’s real,” there is no doubt that she means it and that she will find it in the world of meaning this show has created. The 29-year-old has, after all, never lived in a world where the cameras weren’t there to mediate that love or her basic conception of the person who gives and deserves it.
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Derek Robertson co-authors Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter and is a contributor to Politico Magazine.
