Is our insatiable appetite for reality TV dating shows good for us? Photo / Getty Images
Reality dating shows are booming — but is our insatiable appetite for watching romance good for us?
A couple of years ago a producer went to Brandon Riegg, Netflix's head of unscripted non-fiction, with a pitch. The idea was to take 50 single strangers, strip them of access to the outside world and place them in "pods", separated by partitions, through which they could share their hopes and dreams, dating in rotation for ten days. After which they'd choose whether or not to get engaged — only then would they meet in the flesh. Four weeks later they would get married.
"The pitch was so loud," Riegg says over the phone from California. Initially he hesitated. "I said, 'Look, I get that people will be willing to sign up for that kind of experiment, but how many would get engaged without seeing a person?'" He reckoned they might get one couple at best. The producer convinced him they'd get five. Riegg greenlit the show. In the end, almost a third of the potential couples got engaged, never having met.
Riegg made the right call. The "fiancées" aired their cheesiest sentiments, brides sprinted away from the altar, white trains flailing, one contestant unforgettably shared her glass of wine with her golden retriever, and Love Is Blind became an instant reality television classic. More than 30 million households have watched it. Last month it earned an Emmy nomination — no small feat for a show in its first season.
Love Is Blind is by no means the only dating reality show on our screens this year. Which perhaps seems perverse, given the recent suicides associated with UK ITV's Love Island. The pandemic gave producers a get-out this year (they presumably considered the possibility of a hands-off series for all of 15 seconds before cancelling it), but who would have got over the self-loathing to watch it anyway?
Millions, to judge by the glut of shows stepping up to fill the Casa Amor-shaped hole in television schedules. Netflix has Love on the Spectrum, a five-part newcomer that follows the dating lives of people on the autistic spectrum; Too Hot to Handle, a pseudo-Love Island, in which improbably hot hedonists are placed on a desert island and sentenced to chastity; and Indian Matchmaking, which follows Mumbai's "top matchmaker" as she pairs up prospective candidates — and their families — across America and India. Also new this year is UK Channel 4's Five Guys a Week, in which men move into a woman's house en masse, and she must choose which one she wants to end up with. America, meanwhile, has been blessed with Labor of Love, where men compete to impregnate a woman. For real.
It is far from the last days of disco for reality dating shows. Our appetite for watching romance — if that's what it's called — unfold is bottomless. So what does this mean for where the genre is heading? And what is behind our addiction?
It all begins with Cilla Black and our Graham in 1985, when her hit show Blind Date began nibbling away at the conservativeness surrounding dating and marriage. Big Brother followed 15 years later, and a reality dating show hybrid was spawned. For a while, dating shows weren't something people liked to admit to watching. Now the stigma has vanished, says the television psychologist Jo Hemmings. "As audiences have got younger, because of streaming services and all sorts of things, it's something we are much more open to talking about. There is something fascinating about watching other people dating. It tips us into other people's worlds and how they handle it. No one is trained in how to date, you don't get lessons in it. These shows build confidence and reassurance." In short, watching other people's car-crash dates makes you feel a lot better about your own.
These shows also tap into the anxieties of our age. As our private life has become public and traditional forms of community have receded, we have become obsessed with "coupledom", explains Jilly Kay, a lecturer in media and communication at Leicester University. "It's increasingly the case that to be romantically successful and attractive is really important for a sense of social status and self-worth. Reality dating shows are a way of playing it out, giving us a way to think it through. They make visible the dramas involved, the pain, the humiliation, all the tumultuous rollercoaster that is dating."
The shows are cheap to make and their success has led to commissioners giving them bigger budgets. Now, as Riegg, whose Netflix division formed four years ago, puts it, producers "strive to put the money on screen". This translates into rigorous casting, excellent filming and edits that lend the shows their compulsive seriality. The whole bingeworthy package. For many, dating reality shows have become an equivalent to soaps or rom-coms, only with more realistic storylines. None of the couples paired up by Sima Taparia in Indian Matchmaking stayed together, but that hasn't stopped it becoming a smash hit, albeit a controversial one.
Where next for these shows? There are two almost distinct divisions to the genre. On the one hand, a constant push to find novel ideas is giving rise to ever more niche, extreme formats. The ante is forever being upped to sate our desire to watch messy romantic entanglements play out, no matter how cruel. See: Labor of Love, and Married at First Sight, where couples meet at the altar. Or Naked Attraction, where contestants gradually reveal their nude bodies to a potential mate. Too Hot To Handle is another, with its idea of banning its beautiful sex-mad contestants from physical contact as a way of encouraging "rehabilitation". "It was a very interesting experiment to go through and they came out the other end happier with themselves," Riegg says. Certainly we've come a long way from Blind Date.
Pseudo-educational aspects aside, Love Island and the like are basic escapist entertainment. Screaming matches, abs and unfortunate chat-up lines abound; love doesn't. The other side of the picture is a boom in shows that hark back to traditional, old-fashioned dating, almost as an antidote to the superficiality of Love Island. This is where series such as Indian Matchmaking, Love Is Blind and Love in the Countryside, which follows rural singletons, come in. Every participant is open and unashamed about wanting a full-on relationship. None more so than Love on the Spectrum's Michael, whose dream is "to become a husband" and who has already fashioned a plaque for his future wife. The long-running First Dates is perhaps the simplest format, matching couples who producers genuinely think are compatible over dinner. More than 42.1 million viewers have watched the show and its offshoots, proof that we have a heart.
Indeed, part of the reason we love these shows is that they offer a wholesome alternative to the hook-up culture of Tinder and apps, which turn daters cynical and weary. "We have got used to dating in a very shallow way, it's very 'lookist'," Hemmings says. "You don't get to know much about someone. These shows are a backlash, a search for authenticity and a yearning for depth." So much so that reality dating television veers into documentary territory. Indian Matchmaking, which has been criticised for its acceptance of the country's caste system and colourism, is as much about another culture's dating customs as it is a straight-up dating show. Studio dating game series might not cut it any more, but, this being a quest for love, chaos still often breaks loose on screen — the jeopardy of a high-stakes break-up is as essential as the lure of a relationship that lasts for ever. "You are going to get the normal ups and downs of being in a relationship. I don't know anyone who doesn't have those — we just capture them on camera," Riegg says.
For those who can't get enough of reality dating television and don't dismiss it as poison, the good news is that the format is not going away. The genre has by no means reached its endpoint: far from it, in fact. "There are a lot of other facets of dating and love and relationships we can and will explore," Riegg promises. Who knows what pitch will come next.
Written by: Francesca Angelini
© The Times of London
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