‘The Later Daters’ EPs Talk Giving Seniors a Shot at Love — and Transformation — in Netflix Series

“The Later Daters” brings together six baby boomers for a shot at finding love in the next chapter of their lives, though love isn’t the only thing the single seniors will take away from their time on the Netflix series.

With the cast members leaning on guidance from behavioral scientist Logan Ury as well as their grown children or companions, the Netflix series is just “as much a transformation show as it is a dating show,” according to Boardwalk’s Sarina Roma, who executive produces the series alongside Jonathan Hausfater and Ethan Lewis, who EPs for Higher Ground, where Michelle Obama also executive produces.

“If Mrs. Obama is going to produce a dating show, it can’t just be releasing older folks into the wild and [putting] them in a fish bowl and see what happens,” Lewis told TheWrap. “We need to give this some structure and some sort of some takeaway value for the audience and leave them coming away from it evolved or changed, or having new perspective in some way.”

Below, Roma, Hausfater and Lewis outline where “The Later Daters” diverges from ABC’s “The Golden Bachelor” and why the seniors are finally getting their time to shine.

TheWrap: Where does “The Golden Bachelor” factor into the development of “The Later Daters?”

Jonathan Hausfater: Honestly, “The Golden Bachelor” had nothing to do with our show — It was just kind of in the zeitgeist, it felt like. Not to poo poo that show, but that’s like a competition, and our show is very far from being the competition ours is IRL dating, and that’s why we’ve all felt a connection to it.

Ethan Lewis: I love “The Golden Bachelor.” That’s one of those shows that I feel like we’d all been hearing about for five or six years, and it was one of the things that we were like is, “is that ever gonna get get made?” We actually developed and set this up in Netflix before “The Golden Bachelor” got announced or aired, and so it was kind of this one of those kismet things — everyone in the universe was feeling the same way.

Why do you think there’s been a renewed attention to this demographic and their dating journeys?

Sarina Roma: I think audiences are getting smarter in a lot of ways, and they’re open to watching new people on television do things that others have done for so many years. I just think audiences are craving something different, and this world can open up new conversation and bring in new eyeballs to a topic that has long been well-loved on television.

Jonathan Hausfater: It’s an underserved demographic. It just feels like you see all these dating shows of young, hot people. It doesn’t feel authentic.

Sarina Roma: A lot of young people go on dating shows to get famous and these people really are at a point in their life where they’re looking for love and they’ve exhausted their options because they don’t know how to navigate the dating world today.

Ethan Lewis: Our cast was a lot more, probably in large part because of their wisdom and experience life, skeptical in the beginning. There were a lot of questions, and I think our showrunner did a really good job of of gaining their trust and allowing them to feel comfortable. They’re truly here for trying to better themselves.

What types of people were you looking to cast?

Sarina Roma: We were open to anybody who had a great story and felt like they wanted to go through an authentic experience. We also really looked at their confidants, the people that they brought along with them on this journey. What was their dynamic? Why does this person need love now? And could they actually benefit from working with somebody like Logan?

What were you most surprised from your cast while making the show?

Ethan Lewis: Pam is the most surprising person I’ve ever met, and that’s all I’ll say about that. It was the people that, in the beginning, felt the most guarded and maybe stubborn … that ended up making the biggest strides forward and some of the biggest gains and progress.

Sarina Roma: With this group of people, we are so committed to authenticity. We were just like, fingers crossed. Will these people actually find love? Like, can this experiment work? When we saw our cast members find love, that was really exciting for all of us too, because we believed in this, and we were able to kind of prove it out.

Why did you opt for a more casual, everyday dating environment?

Jonathan Hausfater: That was why we brought in Cian O’Clery, because what he does with “Love on the Spectrum.” There isn’t really a gamification of the format, and that’s what we really were striving to do, just with a different demographic, and that’s what made it authentic and felt original.

Sarina Roma: We also wanted our daters to have autonomy, so if, while we were filming, they met someone in the real world, we could explore that. If they wanted to go on a second date with somebody that would be up to them. We kept trying to say, “do we want to apply rules here?” and at the end of the day, we wanted this experience to be real for them.

Are you hoping to continue the experiment in future seasons?

Sarina Roma: Absolutely. I think we’d like to go to different cities — being in a concentrated hub was important to us, so that these relationships could actually last. When you’re of a certain age, you have really deeply planted roots, and so it’s hard to make a major life change, like a move across the country for an opportunity at love, but by concentrating it in and around Atlanta, that was a possibility. We’d like to move to new cities across the country and give this experiment a whirl.

All episodes of “The Later Daters” are now streaming on Netflix.

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