The Golden Bachelor Wedding Is About Cold, Hard Cash

Hark! Wedding bells chime, an organ rings out, guests shuffle in their seats. Thursday night is the night when The Golden Bachelor’s 72-year-old heartthrob, Gerry Turner, marries the show’s inaugural champion, 70-year-old Theresa Nist.

Gerry and Theresa’s nuptials are neither a private affair, discreet elopement, nor intimate gathering. Oh, please. Gerry and Theresa will tie the knot in the only conceivable manner befitting their highly publicized courtship—on network TV.

“The Golden Wedding,” as ABC has dubbed it, is the series’ fifth stand-alone televised marriage ceremony. But it very well may be the most resplendent yet: The Golden Bachelor was both a ratings smash and a bona fide cultural phenomenon. The story of Gerry Turner was supposed to be one of hope and promise that love can—and should—be found at any age, and a rare vantage into the lives of older daters. Gerry’s only blunders came because of the intrinsically cruel design of the show, proving once and for all that The Bachelor is a hubristic escapade for people of any age—one that seemingly necessitates mortifying heartbreak in the process. Still, it was phenomenal television.

We Bachelor-watchers at Slate harbor no doubt that Gerry and Theresa are madly, disgustingly in love. After all, how could Gerry be anything but completely smitten by Theresa considering what he did to win her hand—namely, dragging the still-beating heart of runner-up Leslie Fhima through a bed of nails? (He better be in love.) Now that our hero Gerry—face like Ted Danson, voice like Kermit the Frog—has found his perfect bride in Jersey Shore finance gal Theresa, they’ll surely be together forever. (They better be, damn it.)

That said, if the opportunity to peacock their love for all to see isn’t enough to satiate their romance-addled egos, Gerry and Theresa have another reason to dive headfirst into a made-for-TV wedding: Cold, hard stinkin’ cash. Weddings are expensive! Gerry and Theresa are getting one for free—and, one could reasonably guess, based on reporting from past Bachelor weddings, a talent fee for appearing at their own nuptials. (ABC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how much the Golden couple is or is not raking in from this.)

Let’s take stock of the dough Gerry and Theresa have already made. Gerry, as the series lead, may have been paid north of $100,000 for the season. (That’s what Bachelorette contestant-turned-podcast-host Jason Tartick said he was offered to be the series lead, though the role ultimately went to Colton Underwood.) Theresa, as the winner, made off with a glimmering Neil Lane princess-cut diamond engagement ring worth an estimated $40,000. ABC also promised them an all-expense-paid vacation to Italy during the finale, which they’ve said they’ll use as a honeymoon. Also, just wait until Gerry and Theresa start posting sponsored content on Instagram, as many leads and winners of the Bachelor series do. Want a reverse mortgage or some Cialis? Check Gerry’s ’gram in a few months.

Now let’s add a wedding venue (rumored to be La Quinta Resort & Club in California), plus catering for a few hundred, a surely over-the-top wedding gown, some tuxes, bridesmaid dresses, live music, and the officiating fee—Golden Bachelor contestant, comedic genius, and Kris Jenner look-alike Susan Noles will be doing the honors, and she’s a pro. Keeping track? Then you, like us, can safely surmise that “The Golden Wedding” will carry a golden price tag in the millions.

The first-ever televised Bachelor union, way back in 2003, was a $3.77 million ($6.27 million adjusted for inflation) wedding for inaugural Bachelorette Trista Rehn and suitor Ryan Sutter. (The couple is still married 20 years later.) As Slate’s Dana Stevens wrote at the time, the bash was stupidly ostentatious: “The high point was the sublimely crass moment in which the cost of every item was literally tallied up onscreen,” she wrote, “from the $50,000 Badgley Mischka gowns to the half-million dollars’ worth of roses.” Trista also had “$50,000 diamond-and-platinum sandals,” she noted. In addition, Trista and Ryan were paid $1 million (which would be $1.6 million today) to do the damn thing on camera. The whole thing was aired in a three-part wedding special that garnered 17 million viewers for the final episode. (To give some context, that’s about what the Washington–Texas Sugar Bowl brought in on Monday, while the smash-hit Golden Bachelor topped out around 8 million viewers. Network television isn’t what it once was.)

ABC is consistently generous when it balls out for Bachelor weddings. When Jason Mesnick and Molly Malaney got married in the California rain in 2010, Malaney sported a $45,000 gown, and American Idol finalist Jason Castro performed. In 2012, Ashley Hebert and J.P. Rosenbaum were reportedly paid $250,000 for their televised wedding. Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici also earned a “six-figure sum” when they were wed in front of the cameras in 2014. When Carly Waddell married Evan Bass on an episode of Bachelor in Paradise—not a full-blown special—they each made $25,000, she recently revealed in an interview on a podcast. Not too shabby.

ABC gave Bachelor Ben Higgins and fiancée Lauren Bushnell their own Freeform (née ABC Family) special in 2017 called Ben and Lauren, Happily Ever After? which followed the pair post-Bachelor. For the one-season run, the couple—now broken up—made about $100,000 each, along with a fee for ABC to use their home for filming.

Gerry and Theresa will surely get a Publishers Clearing House–size check in exchange for agreeing to parade their love about ABC’s Thursday prime-time slot. Of course they can’t say that’s the sole reason for the decision. Theresa told People, “It wasn’t our original timeline, but to be presented with the wedding of our dreams? I mean, spectacular, incredible, wow. Let’s do it.” Great point. She told Extra she felt a “great responsibility” to the fans and wanted to bring them along for the ride. I mean—I’m cynical about it. But I’ll also be watching.