There was good news and bad news for Joan Vassos, ABC’s newly minted “Golden Bachelorette.”

The good news was that the network had gathered two dozen suitors it thought she might like. Producers planned to put her up in a California mansion and send her on dates beneath the Eiffel Tower (the one in Las Vegas, but still).

The bad news was that ABC had tried this before.

“The Golden Bachelor,” a retirement-age spinoff of the network’s dating franchise, premiered to good buzz and even better ratings last year. Then it went haywire. Its lead, Gerry Turner, married his pick, Theresa Nist, and announced their divorce in roughly the span of a fiscal quarter.

So, what would it be? Was the possibility of finding love worth the trouble of inheriting a wobbly reality TV franchise? Was she interested in being the show’s star as well as its cleanup crew?

Ms. Vassos, a 61-year-old grandmother of three, was game for the challenge.

“I know that it’s a weird way to meet somebody,” she said on a video call from her home in Rockville, Md. “I get all that, and I consider myself not a naïve person.”

Ms. Vassos had returned three days earlier from filming the show, which premieres on Sept. 18. She had gone back to work that morning in fund-raising and alumni relations at the Landon School, a private school in Bethesda.

Ms. Vassos was aware, too, that a majority of the couples from the franchise’s two decades on air had not stayed together. But she said she followed its success stories on Instagram, watching former cast members marry and have children.