"Farmer Wants a Wife" Is No TV Bumper Crop

In the spirit of throwing anything against American Idol to see if it sticks, or at least to fill the hour, the CW tonight presents its newest reality series: Farmer Wants a Wife.

Not Farmer Gets a Wife, because that would promise some sort of resolution – and on CW, the network that searched for the next Pussycat Doll only to have the Doll say “Thanks, but no thanks,” it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters.

So here we have a new show that seems old, and overly familiar, from the start. Farmer Wants a Wife is the same show as Outback Jack, only without the Aussie accent. It’s the same pampered-beauties-on-the-prairie approach as the original season of The Simple Life, except that the young ladies in Farmer Wants a Wife care more about attracting the bare-shirted farmer than bonding with each other. (Most of them do, anyway.)

The closest this new, by-the-boring-numbers reality show comes to originality is in its variation on the rose ceremony from The Bachelor. Instead of being presented with long-stemmed flowers, these women must lift a chicken from its roost and see whether there’s an egg underneath.  No egg, and you’re thrown off the farm.

That might sound like a fun sequence to watch, but trust me, it’s not. If you waste an hour watching Farmer Wants a Wife, the yolk’s on you.