Husbands Are Big Game in Glacierville
Love is cold and calculating.
At least it is in Fox’s latest tournament of romance and rejection, “Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska,” a variation on ABC’s “The Bachelor” with the women mostly in control this time. The games begin at 9 p.m. Sunday.
The premise: Five single women in their 20s and 30s travel from the Lower 48 states to Alaska, where it’s snowing rugged men. After six weeks of courting and competing amid awesome glaciers and big skies, each woman hopes to land a husband on her arm.
The players: Andrea, an advertising coordinator from San Francisco; Cecile, a sales analyst from Benicia, Calif.; Karen, a business manager from Hampton, N.H.; Rebekah, a real estate broker from Los Angeles; and Sissie, an interior designer from Myrtle Beach, S.C., plus several dozen local hunks with hobbies such as truck racing and ice fishing.
Sunday’s premiere starts with the guys lined up in army formation and the women immediately ignoring host Steve Santagati’s admonition not to talk to them (no sexist snickering, please). Each woman picks a first date, staking a claim to her “man on ice.”
After a group mingle at the Northern Light lodge, with the svelte and charming Rebekah seizing the aggressor role and working the room, it’s voyeur time: Cut to slow-motion smooching and bantering in the various cabins, cue silky saxophone.
Fresh meat is brought in as four new guys square off in an ax toss, with the winner picking a woman to date (Rebekah, to no one’s shock). The other women then pick dates among the other new guys, but when Cecile and Andrea grab the same one, he has to make a choice: Cecile gets left out in the cold, with only her man on ice.
In a scene that captures the uneasy camaraderie and competition among the women, Rebekah later tells a fuming Cecile, “You know what, this is a game, sweetie.”
Though Rebekah has the dudes dazzled, she may not be the favorite among her peers. Sissie says mockingly, “She wants her Mocha Frappuccino and she wants someone to deliver it to her.”
Each episode ends at Proposal Point with the new guys making a plea for the woman of their choice, hoping to supplant her man on ice, but she selects whom to get know better as the contest continues. Sunday night’s “pleas” include a basket made from twigs (for Sissie) and a schmaltzy poem (for Rebekah, naturally). Fans of the budding “Survivor”-meets-”Love Connection” genre will probably warm to these proceedings, but for the rest of us, Fox may be coming on too strong, like the suitor who sends a dozen roses every day. Already, the bloom is getting old.
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“Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska” premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday. The network has rated it TV-14-LS (may be inappropriate for viewers younger than 14, with advisories for coarse language and sex).