The appeal of the dating show is easy to sum up: the public loves to watch attractive people getting frisky with each other. Thanks to the lure of voyeurism, the schedules and streaming services this summer are bristling with sexual tension. Take your pick from Bachelor in Paradise, Love Island, Married at First Sight, Love Is Blind, and relative newcomer Love on the Spectrum.
If same-sex pairings are your bag, the BBC offers I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl. Then there’s the profusion of international variants and spin-offs these shows have spawned. (Connoisseurs speak especially highly of Married at First Sight Australia.) And if you’re not sated after all that, you can try lesser-known formats, such as Naked Attraction, Sexy Beasts, FBoy Island, MILF Manor, Too Hot to Handle, Ex on the Beach, and My Mum, Your Dad.
Some of the premises are, frankly, eye-popping. Ex on the Beach, for example, recruits a cast of hotties for what they believe will be a romantic island getaway—and then ships in their past partners, with results not dissimilar to those of dumping a box of fireworks on a bonfire.
But if that sounds extreme and manipulative, it’s really not much more so than, say, Married at First Sight, which commits two strangers to legally binding matrimony on the basis of “expert” matchmakers. Or Love Is Blind, which secludes its participants in “pods,” where they date without being able to see each other, then gives them the option to either wed or walk away when they finally meet in person. Some participants have compared the isolation they experienced during production to the mind-control tactics of cults.
Dating shows have come a long way since 1965, when The Dating Game launched the idea of coupling up as entertainment. Filmed in a studio and in front of a live audience, The Dating Game (and its many international iterations) gave a bachelorette the chance to choose from three unseen suitors based on their answers to a series of questions. That format endured, on and off, to the end of the 20th century, but despite attempts to revive it since, it couldn’t survive the rise of reality TV.
When the first reality shows, such as The Real World and Big Brother, emerged in the late 1990s, it quickly became apparent that the storylines audiences fell for the hardest were the romantic ones. So why not build a whole format around the concept of love, with contestants under round-the-clock surveillance? Hence The Bachelor, which began in 2002 and has since birthed The Bachelorette, The Golden Bachelor, The Golden Bachelorette, and Bachelor in Paradise (which features contestants from previous series back for another try at love, ouroboros-style).
The current crop of dating shows has taken that template—the quest for love as televisual drama—and embroidered it wildly. The Bachelor franchise followed The Dating Game by having many contestants competing for one eligible hand. Later formats used even more subtle ways to manipulate the numbers.
Love Island, for example, has equal (or near equal) participants of each sex, introducing “bombshells” throughout the series to shake things up: the challenge on the islands is to couple up and stay coupled. And matchmaking shows like Married at First Sight start from what is conventionally considered the climax of a romance: the tension is in whether the unions will last.
All of them, though, aspire to be, as The Bachelor’s creator, Mike Fleiss, put it, about “beautiful people living a beautiful life and hopefully finding a beautiful love.” Less romantically, participants in an early season of The Bachelor recalled being deprived of sleep and plied with alcohol by producers to keep the drama quotient high. Psychological frailty made for great TV—in the words of one casting director, “Unstable and pretty? That’s gold.”
Since 2017, the show has imposed a two-drinks-per-hour limit, following an allegation of sexual misconduct between two heavily inebriated contestants. (The allegation was dismissed following an investigation.)
Scandal seems to go hand in hand with dating shows. In 1978, The Dating Game featured serial killer Rodney Alcala as a contestant. (Alcala was then mid–murder spree and already a convicted sex offender for an attack on an eight-year-old girl.)
But their gravest episode in the modern era occurred in the U.K. and involved Love Island. Between 2018 and 2020, three people associated with the juggernaut show—contestants Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis, and host Caroline Flack—killed themselves. Thalassitis’s death led to the cancellation of that season of Ex on the Beach, in which he was also a contestant. Flack’s led to a round of media self-flagellation about the treatment of reality stars.
Contestants described off-screen manipulation and a lack of support in adjusting to their post-show lives (although others, such as Season Five breakout star Molly-Mae Hague, loyally defended their treatment). For a brief time, it seemed the public would turn against the cruelty and exploitation inherent in manipulating people’s emotions on-camera for entertainment.
Only a brief time, though. The dating show is, apparently, too valuable to dump. It’s one of the few formats aside from sports that can still convince audiences to commit to linear TV—even fickle Gen Z–ers, who have never had to wait for entertainment, will tune in for the latest episode of Love Island.
And during the coronavirus pandemic, Love Is Blind and Married at First Sight, in particular, spoke to viewers who were experiencing their own version of the profound isolation they were watching take place on the sets.
The appeal of dating shows runs deeper than that, though. In an age of “heteropessimism”—where straight men and women are so appalled by the real-life dating game that many speak openly of giving up altogether—these programs are a last gasp at romance.
Whatever the show, participants in opening episodes often speak of their despair at hookup culture, their horror at the shallowness of dating apps, and their longing to truly find love. If nothing else has worked, why not go looking for it on TV? Yes, everyone knows a stint on a popular show can be a pathway to stardom—but audiences will sniff out and punish contestants they suspect of cynical fame-chasing.
For viewers, the lure is a little more complicated. Dating shows function as a kind of morality play, in which all the tensions of modern dating can be explored. How early is too early for sex? What are your red flags? Why do everyone’s teeth look like that?
All this lends itself to live-action discussion on social media, making dating shows a rare format that actually benefits from Gen Z’s tendency to second-screen, keeping up text conversations while they watch. And, of course, it’s in the producers’ interests to give them plenty to discuss.
The tragedy for the truly naïve participants is that, in trying to escape the meat market of modern dating, they’ve set themselves up to be publicly butchered in the name of unscripted narrative. The real successes are the ones who can play the game yet avoid being seen as cynical. It’s not about winning a life partner—it’s about winning the love of the audience.
Sarah Ditum is a London-based journalist and the author of Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s
