“Farming for Love” revives the chaotic gay dating show

Farming for love was not always a bastion of gay madness. Its origins were quite prudish and went back to the 2001 British reality dating show Farmer seeks wife. That version didn’t stick, but its international counterparts, sucking straws and courting cowgirls, have stuck around for years. There’s even an American reboot that just finished its second season on FOX. It’s Yellowstoneif Kevin Costner were looking for his dream woman. The Canadian edition betrays its roots and adds a new twist: it throws in a car full of gay men.

The CTV hit introduced Farmer Kirkland in its second season, a burly rodeo champion looking for a trusty second pair of hands (and abs) to tend to the ranch. There’s a lot to love about Kirkland: the deep dark eyes, the thick brown beard, the fact that he can sit on a horse like a second nature. Just look at his face glistening with sweat, aptly accompanied by Tinashe’s “Nasty.” Kirkland is also proudly Native American and identifies as Two-Spirit, which adds a surprising amount of depth to the reality show. What is sorely lacking, however, is that depth in his bevy of twink suitors.

The guys have all the hallmarks of a standard edition Bachelor Cast: They giggle during majestic private dates, they moan with pouty eyes at the prospect of lost love, and they argue about who smacked Kirkland. (Spoiler alert: Kirkland doesn’t hold back when it comes to dishing out kisses.) All of this happens in sleeveless cardigans and polo shirts that are two sizes too small. It’s part Love IslandPart Brokeback Mountainbut with a drama that you usually only see in the toilet queue at a Charli XCX concert.

There’s also the problem that, as is the way with gay men in their twenties, they all somehow look exactly the same. Issa is a bearded Greg; Greg is a brown-haired Carson. When Carson sees another blond twink join the dating site, he can’t help but quip, “It’s like a dollar store.” This homogenous collection of gay men makes the drama even more nonsensical. Is it the one with the crew cut who upset Kirkland when he said the barn needed painting? Or was it the one with the single ear piercing? Or maybe the one who always wears flannel pants? They’re all semi-cloned versions of each other, showered with vocal stuff.

It is this light, meandering gay drama that Farming for love with the highest rating on the Richter scale of disorder. It is almost nostalgic, it goes back to the time of the standalone gay episodes of MTV’s wild reality shows. A clip from Next seems to pop up at X once every six months; Evan, a curly-haired dance enthusiast, rejects a suitor after the latter offers him a “limp dick” handshake. Space Robber There were also a few gay one-offs, including one in which a cheeky law student described his love of exploring “the meat market” to see “what tastes good in his first pack.” These episodes were mini-epicenters of chaos, both cutting and painfully serious.

Today, gay reality TV has a high-low problem. On the one hand, there are the upscale, public-access shows. There are The true friends of WeHoMTV’s failed Housewives-style series about a group of successful “friends” in the entertainment industry. They were sanitized, publicly consumable gays (unless you investigate how Todrick Hall allegedly treated his backup dancers). Because the show tried so hard to present itself as upscale, it ended up being irrefutably bland.

And then there are the lower-tier shows that are so outlandish that they lack any emotional depth. For the love of DILFs asks an important question: What if we paired a handful of young himbos with the world’s hottest daddies? All hosted by Stormy Daniels. It’s shocking, funny, but it never tugs at the heartstrings as effectively as a good dating show should.

Farming for love lands perfectly between the two. It is not mindless and meaningless like some of Logo’s muscular attempts at reality TV (see: Finding the fairytale prince, Fire Island.) Yet there is no such thing as an outlandish premise conceived in the darkest corners of writers’ rooms, like From couple to group of threeWhen farmer Kirkland gives Greg a riding lesson and notices that the horse’s oiled mouth betrays his soft hands, you can’t help but feel something.

This is the profit Farming for love some online virality, expanding the show’s reach far beyond its Canadian broadcast territory. Commentators not only laugh at Issa’s jab at Kirkland for a “daring” pink board shorts set; they also cheer when Kirkland sends Issa packing because he deserves better. Of course, Kirkland is only one of four farmers in the show’s second season, but his clips garner some of the biggest fan interactions on the internet. And it’s no wonder, since gay viewers, both hopeless romantics and dark drama fanatics, are hungry for content. Farmer Kirkland, the stud that he is, provides the perfect amount of uncontrived messiness while fiddling with his toys.