Why Senior Citizen Love Stories Are Thriving On TV

A handful of 2023’s popular streaming series and one of the year’s most highly-anticipated broadcast shows share a refreshing, rewarding throughline: senior love stories.

While late-in-life love — both on and off-screen — is nothing new, romantic relationships between people over 60 feel much more prevalent, fleshed out, and accepted on television in recent years. Among the numerous portrayals of senior love, Apple TV+‘s Severance brought an added air of wisdom to workplace romances by showing two older men, Burt (Christopher Walken, 80) and Irving (John Turturro, 66), get their flirt on. The platform’s breakout comedy, Shrinking, saw Paul (Harrison Ford, 81) turn on the charm for his doctor, Julie (Wendie Malick, 72). The fourth and final season of Netflix‘s Never Have I Ever built up to the wedding of fan-favorite grandma Nirmala (Ranjita Chakravarty, 65) and her boyfriend Len (Jeff Garlin, 61). And the Bachelor Franchise’s newest spinoff, The Golden Bachelor, will follow 71-year-old Gerry Turner, a grandfather and retired restaurateur, as he searches for a partner in his golden years.

Aside from positively impacting viewers and encouraging single seniors to get back in the dating game, experts say the moment of appreciation for mature love stores is a hopeful sign of a larger cultural shift — one that embraces aging and further expands on-screen representation.

“I think one of the big reasons [for the trend] is the population is aging… And we’re embracing it,” Mary Joye, a licensed mental health counselor in Central Florida said in a phone interview with Decider. Dating, sexuality, and love don’t cease to exist because people reach a certain age, so when TV creators and writers strive to be inclusive of that authenticity, Joye feels art imitates life. “They’re tapping into an audience. It’s there. And they know it’s there because they hear it,” the 66-year-old explained, adding that seeing mature romantic relationships on screen gives people of all generations hope.

Joye, who split from her husband at age 45, noted that Gray Divorce — the trend of older couples divorcing, often after years of marriage — is rampant, and though it’s “such a horrible thing, it’s also causing the wonderful thing of people looking for love at that age.” While seniors dating post-divorce is becoming more normalized on TV, it isn’t the only inspiring storyline unfolding on screens.

Never Have I Ever‘s main focus is Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a teen finding herself during her formative high school years while navigating a love triangle between two crushes. In its final hours, however, the series gives Devi’s grandma, Nirmala (Chakravarty) — a widow of 20 years — a romance of her own. She initially keeps her relationship a secret, because in her mind “respectable widows” aren’t supposed to move on from their spouses. But after hearing that “wanting companionship is not shameful,” she introduces her boyfriend to the family and the series concludes with their joyous nuptials. In cases like this, it’s not only crucial that Never Have I Ever successfully showed a senior finding love again after loss, but that the series highlighted relatable struggles a widowed person may experience when faced with moving on.

“In the old days, once somebody died, you never remarried… So it’s showing how cultural values are changing,” Joye said. “A lot of spouses have plans. They’d tell each other, ‘If you get married again, I’ll haunt you.’ Now, the pervasive thing we hear is, ‘Look, if I die before you, I want you to be happy.’ We’ve evolved.” A Season 5 episode of The Resident beautifully captured this sentiment, and other popular series like This Is Us tackled the bittersweet complexities of getting a second chance at love after the death of a spouse.

Shrinking outlines another specific scenario, in which Paul (Ford) — a stubborn, seasoned therapist navigating Parkinson’s disease — starts dating his doctor, Julie (Malick). Rather than solely focusing on his tragic diagnosis, the hopeful storyline reminds people that aging, and the health issues that often come later in life, don’t mean love is out of the question. 

“I think about a person who is suffering from something, who feels like somebody’s gonna have to take care of them and thinks that’s unattractive. And what they fail to recognize is how much a person who’s able to give help gets out of that… It’s good for both people. It’s good that somebody still feels they can make a difference in somebody else’s life,” Dr. Nicki Nance, a 75-year-old retired therapist and current professor at Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida, shared in a phone call with Decider. 

“And look at the two characters in [Shrinking] There’s a doctor and a therapist — and what’s happening is they both have wisdom. They’re living in the moment and [don’t] keep thinking about their aches and pains. Adrenaline and dopamine, we’re still capable of making [them] when we’re older,” Joye, a proud fan of the show, noted. “I love it that a lot of these [shows] are injecting humor, too. Just because we’re old doesn’t mean we’re not funny. We have the same emotions in our sixties.”

Though both experts feel senior love stories are thriving on TV today and will hopefully sharpen in years to come, when asked for on-screen examples of senior romance that resonated with them, Joye and Nance each highlighted films. For Joye, Erin Simms and Bill Holderman’s 2018 rom-com Book Club is a perfect example. “You know when Diane Keaton meets Andy Garcia, and [her daughters] are gonna move her into assisted living? [They] want her to live in god-awful Phoenix with them, and she meets Andy Garcia as a pilot, and she just goes, ‘OK! That’s it for me girls. I’m not old anymore.’ I think it’s important. I think it gives people hope,” she said. As for Nance, she still references Something’s Gotta Give, Nancy Meyers’ 2003 rom-com starring Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, in her adult development and aging classes. “The best scene in it was they’re having sex and the sex was fine, but there were aches and pains and ‘I can’t get in this position.’ You know? The days of the one-arm push up are over,’” she said, laughing.

TV may have taken some time to catch up with the film industry, but in Fall 2023, ABC is exploring late-in-life love stories through a fresh lens: reality TV. When asked about the forthcoming senior dating show, The Golden Bachelor, Nance said the franchise is obviously fun to watch, but she’s interested to see what draws seniors to this kind of experience. “Something I always tell my clients, no matter what age group, is do not be a tomato waiting for somebody to come and pick you off the vine,” she said. “That’s a horrible way to start a relationship. You’re in a competition. You’re so busy looking sideways at how you have to be compared to somebody else, that you don’t look forward into the relationship and say, will this work? And is this gratifying for both of us?”

Joye is a bit skeptical of the series as well, but she’s sure The Golden Bachelor contestants will have one thing lacking on the younger shows: wisdom. “Rejection hurts at any age… [But] they’re going to be able to handle that rejection better, because they’ve probably been rejected 1,000 times in their life by that point — by jobs, people, girlfriends, boyfriends,” Joye explained. “I think there’s some wisdom you only get with age, so I love that young people will [see that].”

In terms of senior romance, as is so often the case, television still has a long way to go with representation, but progress is made each time a series highlights a variety of non-traditional relationship trajectories such as late-in-life love, marriage, and dating post-divorce or death of a spouse. Embracing diversity within senior relationships — such as interracial romance in Never Have I Ever and LGBTQ+ stories like Burving’s in Severance — is equally important. As are depictions of senior friendship, senior self-love, and seniors content with their single status — found in series like Virgin River and Grace and Frankie.

“There are thousands of stories to be told there,” Nance said. The hope is that telling them thoughtfully and authentically will make seniors feel seen; inspire them to pursue companionship (which will help stave off the detrimental impacts of loneliness); and remind people of all ages to realize it’s never too late to find love.