Dating Shows Need To Evolve – Or Die

Love. If you’re looking for it and you haven’t done it on a reality TV show you’re in a growing minority. We’ve had first dates, blind dates, dinner dates, dates with celebrities, double dates, speed dates and dates on dirt bikes in Fernando’s (RIP Take Me Out). At this point television producers must have a handbook on setting up cheap dates in foreign countries - the Love Islandgo-to is a bottle of unlabelled cava at a plastic table with a bowl of nuts (estimated cost: €12).

There are barely enough hours in the day in which to panic binge all the latest dating shows in order to avoid feeling left out on the group chat. In the last couple of weeks Love is Blind, Netflix’s latest mad offering, hosted, inexplicably, by Jessica Simpson’s ex-husband Nick Lachey, has dominated social media chat (particularly after one of the contestants fed her golden retriever red wine from her glass).Netflix

Love Island’s viewing figures may have been down during its latest winter series (the final was watched by a million viewers less compared to the summer 2019 final), but it still maintained its position as one of ITV2’s most watched shows. Celebs Go Dating recently began its eighth series in just four years, with stars like Made in Chelsea’s Olivia Bentley and ITV presenter Alison Hammond searching for love with ‘normal’ people via a ‘celebrity dating agency’, lots of double entendre and a genuinely laugh-out-loud narration from comedian Rob Beckett.cel

Last week Channel 4 announced its latest dating concept: Five Guys a Week which is about, you guessed it, dating five guys in one week, making it the ninth dating show currently in production in this country, joining the likes of First Dates, Married at First Sight, Dinner Date, Ex on the Beach, Naked Attraction, and the rebooted Blind Date.

Many of us grew up religiously watching the OG Blind Date with Cilla Black in the eighties, but since those innocent days we have certainly seen dating shows become more...inventive. Who could forget 2004’s Playing It Straight, in which a gay man tried to trick female contestants into thinking he was straight, nineties pool-pushing-extravaganza Man O Man with Chris Tarrant, Flavor of Love with Public Enemy’s Flava Flav or I Wanna Marry Harry, the 2014 dating show which fooled 12 American women into thinking they were actually competing to marry Prince Harry?

The gimmicks are still in play - on Love is Blind they get engaged without even seeing each other after all, and the less said about Naked Attraction the better - but the most communally popular breed of dating show seems to be one in which some of the contestants find a genuine connection. Anna Williamson, one of the dating coaches on E4’s Celebs Go Dating, tells Grazia, the relatability is a big factor for viewers who want to find love themselves.

‘Relationships are something that we can all identify with, they’re attainable, we all stand to have a little piece of the pie, and we are all uniquely different,’ says Anna. ‘That’s why watching dating shows gives us an opportunity to compare, measure and identify ourselves in others, and to see how others interact and behave.’

There’s something aspirational involved in these shows too: walking onto a Spanish island for a ten week holiday and leaving with a boyfriend sounds a whole lot whizzier than swiping through Tinder or Hinge and enduring hundreds of dates as tepid as a cup of sick. TV podcast Series Linked host Mark Jefferies says, ‘Some of the far-fetched ideas – like getting engaged without meeting face-to-face in Love Is Blind – alongside glamorous destinations also add a sense of escapism to some of the shows which is just what many people need after a hard day at work or if they’ve just been dumped themselves.’

You can hardly blame us for wanting some uplifting escapism right now. Sobbing along to a Love Islander reading a haiku about why they want to couple up with someone seems like an innocent enough way to break the scare cycle.

Writer Boyd Hilton, who hosts Pilot TV Mag’s weekly podcast, says that reality shows have overtaken the talent shows which ruled the noughties, like the X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent, because of how close we get to their contestants. ‘It is instant gratification TV soap opera. We meet real people who are instantly happy to share their private lives and needs, who are searching for love, which feels more significant perhaps than the search for stardom and fame.’

It is, however, possible we may have already reached ‘peak dating show’ - particularly when we don’t seem to be getting any closer to a diverse representation of bodies, race or same sex couples. The mental health of contestants applying to shows where their vulnerability and emotional journey is manipulated for drama is something that is also being pulled into focus.

TV and culture editor Alice Jones says that the key to the evolution of the dating show in 2020 lies in diversity, ‘in the broadest sense of the word, so that the pursuit of romantic happiness is not portrayed as the sole preserve of straight, white, young, able-bodied people who look good in Boohoo swimwear.’ She adds, ‘Second, kindness. Or at the very least not outright cruelty which is increasingly hard for viewers to stomach. It may sound glib, but there’s a reason First Dates is about to start its 14th series - it‘s a show that, for the most part, brings out the best in people, and encourages them to look for the best in others. There’s something joyous and uplifting about that. And we all need reasons to be cheerful.’

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