It’s the month of love. Contractually, we are not allowed to have any of our other months be about love. So I think it’s time we talk about the most romantic of all genres: the reality dating show. Ok, I’m putting you on a bit; you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s a paucity of romance in the reality dating show. It’s hard to trust people are “there for the right reasons” when the point of a reality competition show is to… compete for money. If you know me, you’ve definitely heard at least one rant about how I think the The Bachelor and its associated properties are pretty horrible (more rants below). But when a genre has this many loyal adherents (including me), I think it is worth examining what is going on.
Reality dating shows have exploded in popularity over the last ten years, with the pandemic era really becoming a boom time for the genre. Netflix leads the pack in new shows, but mainstay channels like Bravo and TLC have continued to make reality romance a staple of their daily content. But nothing is as perfect a bellwether of our times than the addition of Netflix’s Perfect Match. Perfect Match takes leading characters from other reality shows in the Netflix cinematic universe and brings them all together. They have to match up and compete in challenges that ostensibly test their compatibility. As new characters come in, those bonds are tested. It’s all pretty standard reality dating show fare, but the fact that the pool of contestants is comprised of people who’ve already been successful at either winning or at least making a name for themselves on their respective shows really impacts the mechanics of the game. Interestingly, some of the contestants are from reality shows that have no dating component, such as Selling Tampa, The Circle, and The Mole, which widens the pool of potential mates and diversifies the skills they bring to the game. This sort of dating show inception is probably something of a high water mark for the genre; it’s highly produced, features Love is Blind mainstay host Nick Lachey, and is exactly the right level of deranged to keep viewers hooked. But it’s also the point at which it feels pertinent to stop and ask if dating shows have finally jumped the proverbial shark.
In order to answer that question, I want to ask a few other questions about the reality dating show phenomenon and see if we can get to the bottom of what makes the genre so popular.
So… why are reality dating shows so popular?
On the face of it, this one seems like it has an obvious answer. Conventionally attractive singles gather in a foreign beachy clime to love up on each other. It’s pretty easy to see why that formula would attract viewers. There’s romance, betrayal, skimpy bathing suits, FashionNova clubbing outfits, opaque wineglasses, beautiful vistas, and silly silly challenges. This is basically what makes Love Island great and Love Island is the OG dating show whose success everyone else is ultimately trying to chase. Every pitch room must have heard a thousand versions of “it’s like Love Island but… (insert here one of the following: with siblings, with MILFs, with extensive face makeup and/or prosthetics, with all your exes, with a wall in between couples, without sex).
But what is it that actually appeals to us on a deeper level? I watch hours and hours of these shows and derive real pleasure from doing so. I think their appeal partly derives from the debt they owe to soap operas. There’s a whole host of producers behind the cameras pulling strings and orchestrating storylines, not to mention the editors who cut up weeks worth of film to create appealing narratives. They shape those narratives to appeal to existing soap opera genre tropes because they know viewers are familiar with them. The toxic lovers, the misunderstanding that drives true lovers apart, the underdog, the nerd with a heart of gold- these and more are present across reality television. But I think the thing that draws people to reality dating shows rather than to scripted dramas is actually the reality part. No matter how much we know these shows are scripted and edited within an inch of their lives, we are all looking for the moment the mask slips. In that moment, when a reality star’s tears or smiles actually feel real, we feel like we’ve seen the triumph of human emotion over cynical scripting.
What formula works the best?
These shows have increasingly relied on rapid iteration and the addition of a fresh flashy hook. Shows like The Bachelor have increasingly felt old school in terms of gender politics and formula, with few attempts to bring anything new to the game. The Bachelorette’s now infamous “there’s two Bachelorettes season” is as close to an experiment as they’ve been willing to make, and the only thing fresh about that was… there were two. But other networks have seen the value in setting themselves apart from the competition, with varying degrees of success. Dated & Related, for instance, manages to make their schtick work by leaning into the strong sibling friendships while (mostly) staying away from the potential Game of Thrones ick factor of trying to make out with your partner in front of your sibling. MILF Manor, on the other hand, leans in to the incest vibes SO HARD and is thus virtually unwatchable. From my vast survey of the industry, I’d say that the less intrusive the hook is, the better the show tends to be. On a show like Sexy Beasts (the face-concealing makeup one), the hook is very in your face, shall we say. But on a show like Too Hot to Handle (the no sex one), the hook is just sort of a background condition of being there and kind of fades away the longer you watch it, which lets the human connections have time to shine.
The other formula element I am interested in is the nuts and bolts mechanics of these shows; basically, how do you play and how do you win? For most of these shows you are ultimately judged on the strength of your relationship with a chosen partner, so your objective throughout is to spend all of your time and energy on getting to know one person. Making this possible for the contestants is more difficult than it would initially seem. There have to be enough partners for everyone to choose from but not so many that people feel either complacent waiting for the perfect person to come in or hop from bed to bed making shallow connections. There has to be enough time for people to get to know each other and for the viewers to get to know their relationship, which means a show like Love Island is always going to have a leg up, as they somehow edit and post a new episode FIVE DAYS A WEEK FOR SIX WEEKS STRAIGHT. That asks a lot of time investment from fans, but also mimics the soap opera formula even more directly (and their viewership numbers prove this actually works). The benefit of doing this is viewers get a lot of time with their favorite couples, encouraging empathy and parasocial bonding. It’s harder to buy in to a relationship on a show like Love is Blind, where we at best get a few montages of couples talking before they choose to get engaged and often see very little or no interaction between couples that don’t work out. People also have to stay on the show long enough to bond with a potential partner but also have to feel at constant risk of elimination as new people are brought in to spice up the dynamic. Finally, the challenges have to be silly enough to engage us but also useful in bonding the pairs. Too Hot to Handle has always leaned in to challenges that try to therapize the contestants, which in my opinion always feels a little patronizing, while newcomer Perfect Match strikes the right balance, presenting challenges that require teamwork between pairs but are also entertaining to watch (there’s this sponges tied to your genitals challenge that had me rolling with laughter). The success of a show is heavily tied to them getting the mechanics of it all right, and were I to rank my favorite dating shows, this would be a top factor.
Do they actually accomplish their objective?
One standard by which to judge this could be to ask how many couples from a show end up having a real relationship outside of that show. This is often pointed to as a reason why The Bachelor universe is so flawed. Very very few of its contestants end up getting married (the ostensible point of being on the show) and even fewer stay together for longer than a year. I believe the incentives, formula, and mechanics of The Bachelor make it close to impossible to form a real relationship with a partner that has any chance of surviving the end of the show, but not all shows fail that test. Love Island boasts many strong couples, several of which have gone on to get married or engaged in the years after their season.
But perhaps the more pertinent place to start answering this question is to ask what the objective actually is. For most of these shows the incentive to be there is threefold: meet a potential romantic partner, get Instagram followers, and win some kind of money. For shows like The Bachelor or The Ultimatum, there’s a very clear objective to being there. You are trying to end the show engaged to your partner, especially in The Bachelor franchise which has an actual partnership with engagement ring designer Neil Lane (my understanding is you get a free ring but you have to return it if you don’t go through with the wedding). I think this is WAY too much pressure to put on a reality dating competition. I understand being attracted to the purity of a show that purports to only have true love as its prize, but there’s a good reason the vast majority of the engagements/marriages on shows like Love is Blind don’t work out: you cannot form a good foundation for a marriage under those conditions and it is unreasonable to expect couples to combine their credit scores after 3 weeks of hanging out on camera. I vastly prefer the objectives of shows like F-Boy Island, which aims to create strong emotional connections but then leaves it up to the couples to decide what comes next. Many of the couples from Love Island have stayed together, but I don’t think it is likely they would have if they’d been required to get engaged at the end of it. These shows skew pretty young contestant-wise, with many people admitting early on to never having been in serious relationships. Putting less pressure on the outcome of the show gives everyone a better chance to succeed after it (and less fallout if you don’t).
As an addendum, another strength of shows like Love Island is that even if you don’t win it, you can still form a strong couple that makes it to the end or near the end of the show. You don’t win money, but you do win a lot of Instagram love, sponsorships, and C-level fame. This makes the incentive to form a relationship much stronger, whereas on a show like The Bachelor there is only going to be one couple at the end of the whole thing just by nature of its design, thus setting up the more perverse incentive to distinguish yourself as an individual in hopes of getting followers, sponsorships, and spin-off casting offers.
Are they ethical?
Probably not. Look, I fully believe that the people on these shows are adult enough that we should respect that they have given their consent to be surveilled, obsessed over, tested, and humiliated on camera for weeks. As this genre has grown so has the pool of people who are pretty well informed as to what the experience of being on these shows is going to be like, though you probably do need to actually be there to fully get it. But it is undeniable that there’s an ugly underbelly to a lot of this, something that others have documented well. These shows skew very straight, they glorify traditional bodies, and entrench established gender stereotypes. I also really have trouble watching both The Bachelor universe and the Love is Blind universe, mainly because it feels like the women especially are being humiliated and emotionally tortured for my viewing pleasure. How much one can really consent to that is definitely up for debate.
What’s the future of the genre?
Well, The Bachelor is trying to case a geriatric season, so that’s something. At the top, I asked if dating shows have finally jumped the shark, or to put it in a less overused cliché way: have we reached such a saturation of reality dating shows that any new show will feel the need to flashily disrupt in such a way that the show itself will suck? I actually think no. I think that reality dating shows have actually just begun to assert themselves as a fully realized genre. These shows are relatively cheap to produce compared to scripted series and they get a lot of viewership. They aren’t gourmet cheeseburgers, exactly, but they’re some totally satisfying McDonald’s fries. You can consume them in a short period of time and then forget about them.
To me, the reality dating show market is comparable to the hard seltzer market. First, there was just White Claw (in this metaphor, Love Island), which exploded on the scene with enough force that it became a part of the discourse and a part of the meme-course. Then every alcoholic beverage company had to have a bunch of panicked internal meetings where they asked themselves how they could do their own version of White Claw, but with enough of a twist that people would be interested in trying theirs over someone else’s. Whether it’s Bang Energy Hard Seltzer or Vizzy or hard kombucha or whatever, every one of the new seltzer brands has their own schtick (it’ll give you energy, it’s healthy for you, it’s lower calorie, it’ll turn your tongue green, whatever). Then came the inevitable discourse about the over-saturation of the hard seltzer market. But guess what? Despite the way too many options of it all and the mediocre flavors sometimes and the ones that tried something new that just didn’t work (Bang Energy Hard Seltzer is MILF Manor, I won’t be taking questions at this time) we are still drinking them. The same is true of reality dating shows. I think we’re just starting to see this genre come into its own, which inevitably will mean some bad eggs, but can also lead to some real innovation. So cheers to that.
If you’ve made it through this whole post, crack a delicious White Claw. You deserve it.