If you read celebrity gossip sites, you may have seen the recent rumors about Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani. Dating! Maybe! Because they're both divorced now! (Life & Style says their chemistry is "off the charts," for what it's worth.) Shelton even added some fuel to the fire:
"Getting ready this morning to go put in my deer plots and looked at Twitter... Damn my dating life is awesome!! Let me know what happens..."
Not only were those rumors suspicious because Shelton effectively denied it with his snarky tweet, but also because NBC's The Voice - on which Shelton and Stefani are both judges - happened to premiere on Monday night. It's a question you always need to ask yourself when you see a story about two celebrities dating. Do they have a TV show or movie about to debut? Are they currently starring on one that needs viewers?
It's a time-honored Hollywood tradition of the faux-showmance, and one we can't help but notice as the TV season begins. A faux-showmance can work in different ways: Fake rumors that helps build intrigue around a TV series or film, or a romance sparked on set that is actually real but will nonetheless give the project attention. Either way, you'll probably, magically, start to see some headlines when a show's ratings drops, generally confirmed by anonymous sources close to the couple. (Publicists.)
Why would viewers even care? Usually it's just superficial reasons, but ones that admittedly work. "Hollywood fauxmances work because the public wants to see beautiful, famous people together," one showbiz expert told the Sydney Morning Herald several years ago, back when "Twilight" fans were frantically trying to figure out if Robert Pattison and Kristen Stewart were really together. "With all the tabloids and overexposure of celebs these days, having two huge A-listers paired together sells magazines and movies."
