Dawn Bonker
Most new college graduates might consider themselves lucky if they score a decent couch off Craigslist. But Turner Jacobs ’12 did much better. He landed a spot on a Norwegian reality television show that invited him to go to Norway in search of the girl of his Nordic dreams. Tough work, but someone’s got to do it, right?
“Yeah, my friends were all pretty jealous,” says Jacobs, who graduated with a BFA in television production and a B.A. in European history.
Now Jacobs is a star on “Sons of Norway,” a popular reality television show that brings single Americans of Norwegian descent to their family’s ancestral home in hopes of sparking a little Norwegian-American romance. Filming has concluded, but the season is still airing in Norway so Jacobs is mum as to how it plays out or if a Norwegian girl has followed him across the Atlantic. But he assures us there won’t be any cutthroat humiliations or screaming cat fights. Norwegians are big fans of reality television, but of a much kinder and gentler style.
“They have this genre of reality shows over in Norway that I guess you could call feel-good reality shows,” he says.
The adventure all began shortly after Jacobs, 23, graduated from Chapman last May. Back home in Santa Cruz he was prowling through the Craigslist job postings when he saw the call for bachelors to audition for the reality show. Jacobs had the main ingredients – time, willingness to travel and a Norwegian bloodline, thanks to his maternal grandmother back in Minnesota. But he believes a pitch video he created with his film skills helped clinch the deal.
Soon a Norwegian film crew arrived to capture Jacobs on his home turf as he surfed, hiked in the redwoods and strolled the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Filming continued over the course of a couple trips to Norway. One episode he says the Norwegians found especially amusing was one in which he blushingly explains the American baseball metaphor to describe the stages of dating, starting with “getting to first base.”
“I guess that went over really well in Norway,” he says.
Eventually he chose four of the seven women vying for his affections to come back to Santa Cruz for a visit. One by one, he sent the women home until just one was left and he returned with his chosen date to Norway to meet her family. To follow where the story goes from there, Jacobs suggests following the episodes at www.sumo.com. A grasp of Norwegian would help, but the bilingual Norwegians frequently speak English for Jacobs’ benefit, so the gist of events is fairly evident.
Jacobs is home again, tutoring, producing music videos for local bands and working on graduate school applications. But he counts the Norwegian bachelor experience as more than a lark.
“I also learned a lot more about television,” he says. “It was kind of interesting to see the whole process in front of the camera instead of being behind the camera.”
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