‘Farmer Wants a Wife’: Inside TV’s Genius, Silliest Dating Show
Since Farmer Wants A Wife—a reality dating show whose premise is contained in its title—debuted on Britain’s ITV in 2001, it has spawned more than 30 remakes in markets around the world. A couple dozen had already premiered when The CW mounted its take in the spring of 2008, and once that tanked, some producers would assume the concept was burnt for U.S. audiences. But Chris Culvenor is different, and if Fox’s version of the series, which premiered Wednesday night, works, it will be because Culvenor, an executive producer with dozens of unscripted series to his credit, brought the show back to its original concept.
“The CW version was largely a departure from the standard Farmer Wants A Wife format,” Culvenor, who was not involved with that iteration, told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. Though The CW’s version featured just one titular farmer in a kind of rural Bachelor, Culvenor’s adaptation follows the model international audiences have watched, and which he and fellow executive producer, Paul Franklin, have already mounted in Australia: “Multiple farmers on multiple different farms, and women who are looking for love, actually living with them, and trying out what life on the farm is really like.”
Culvenor means this literally. The premiere kicks off with each of four Farmers meeting his eight Wife candidates in 10-minute speed dates. Afterward, the Farmers each choose five women to move with them to their actual farms, getting to know each other through the typical activities and tasks one undertakes on a working ranch. As on The Bachelor, the Farmers also get one-on-one time with the women who’ve come to live with them; in this case, it’s 24 hours with the one woman of each man’s choice, once a week. Over six weeks on the farms, the pool of women keeps shrinking—until, ideally, the Farmers have each determined which one will be his Wife.