Meet TV's New 'Golden Bachelor,' Mel Owens

The 66-year-old NFL veteran turned attorney will star in the second season of the hit reality dating show

Tim Appelo,

AARP

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Published April 23, 2025

Maarten de Boer/Courtesy Disney

When Mel Owens, 66, played football for the Michigan Wolverines, and then for the NFL’s LA Rams, “I was trying to knock dudes out,” he has said.

Now he’s out to sweep women off their feet as the second star of Disney’s hit reality dating show The Golden Bachelor, set to air sometime in the 2025-2026 season.

After his 1981-89 NFL stint, Owens became a Merrill Lynch financial advisor, then attended the University of California Hastings College of Law and became a partner in the Orange County, California firm Namanny, Byrne & Owens, specializing in seeking justice for people with sports-related injuries.

“As the Golden Bachelor, he’s eager to meet someone who shares this vision and finally find that perfect teammate he’s been waiting for in his golden years,” according to his Disney bio. And fitness will likely be a top priority. Owens competed in the Los Angeles marathon and ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, and he’s still fit and up for adventure travel.

Owens divorced Fabiana Pimentel, his wife of 25 years, in 2020. He remains a devoted dad to their two sons, whom he coaches on their extracurricular sports teams.

Fans are hoping things work out better for Owens and the golden bachelorette of his dreams than they did for the first season's star Gerry Turner, 73, and Theresa Nist, 71, who announced their divorce 99 days after their wedding was televised in January 2024.

Their problems included his bout with the slow-growing cancer Waldenström's macroglobulinemia, and the fact that he lived in Indiana, she in New Jersey, and he didn't want to move.

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"I withdrew from her," Turner said on an April 15, 2025 podcast, Bachelor Happy Hour. "I felt like maybe I was a source of bad feelings and the negativity that came out of the show and so forth. So I kind of avoided talking to her and not out of, you know, ill will or being combative at all. Just, I thought it was better if we gave each other space."

On the bright side, Turner said he's found a new love, one he doesn't want to publicize just yet.

Few shows are more popular among the 50-plus audience than The Golden Bachelor. AARP's extensive coverage of the show is part of its advocacy work around aging in Hollywood, which also includes the annual Movies for Grownups Awards, telecast on PBS.

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“The 50-plus audience wants to see themselves on the screen,” says Heather Nawrocki, vice president of AARP’s Movies for Grownups program. They also want Hollywood to tap into the unique perspectives and talents that 50-plus actors, writers and producers bring to their work.“ That’s why the work that AARP does to fight ageism in Hollywood through the Movies for Grownups Awards is so important,” Nawrocki adds.

Heeding the AARP demo is good business, as Disney has discovered. “The Golden Bachelor helped usher in a new era for the franchise to appeal to a new and underserved demographic of ABC’s audience: adults over 50,” The Hollywood Reporter's Lesley Goldberg told AARP. The Golden Bachelor wasn’t just watched on broadcast TV — it set records on streaming too, becoming the most popular Bachelor show in years and the most-streamed ABC show ever on Hulu.

It’s proof of the clout of the AARP generations, who loom ever larger in the streaming audience as well as keeping broadcast TV in business.

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Tim Appelo covers entertainment and is the film and TV critic for AARP. Previously, he was the entertainment editor at Amazon, video critic at Entertainment Weekly, and a critic and writer for The Hollywood Reporter, People, MTV, The Village Voice and LA Weekly.

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