Love Island. Too Hot To Handle. Married At First Sight. Love Is Blind. The Ultimatum. When it comes to watching strangers find love, it seems the TV soil is more fertile than ever. Yep, dating reality shows are well and truly reigning supreme.
Of course, this summer has featured an explosive return to the Love Island villa, but there’s also plenty more to come. Netflix’s next venture, Dated and Related (which sees siblings helping each other find love) is set to land imminently, while a UK version of MTV’s Are You The One? (promising contestants their perfect match among a group of singles) airs in August.
And then you've got Jewish Matchmaking, Indian Matchmaking and the seventh season of Married At First Sight UK. It's clear theTV landscape has a non-exhaustive list of formats through which to play matchmaker (successfully or not), but why are reality dating shows taking over our screens? And what does it say about where we’re at with romance now?
As many of us know, finding love in the real world can sometimes feel pretty limited. Genuinely viable avenues essentially boil down to three camps: dating apps, nights out, or IRL acquaintances (work colleagues, uni mates, friends of friends etc.). But in the dizzying heights of the dating reality show world, the options are endless. TV platforms have managed to take pretty much any activity and turn it into a framework for finding love. See: dancing (Channel 4’s Flirty Dancing), singing (ITV’s Romeo and Duet), cooking (Love Bites, and of course our old friend Dinner Date, both on ITV). Then there are the bolder ‘experiments’, with the likes of Love Is Blind and Married At First Sight testing out new and daring ways to set contestants up with compatible matches - not to mention Naked Attraction. Meanwhile, Love Island and Too Hot To Handle seem to have landed on an intoxicating combination of attractive singles, sunny weather and luxury villas. Isn't that just the epitome of a holiday romance, dressed up in a neon string bikini and filmed for an eight week experiment?
While the dating show production cycle seems to be churning out more content than ever, the genre is far from new. UK viewers have been obsessed with the likes of Blind Date since the ‘80s, originating in the US under the title The Dating Game as far back as 1965. Later, the 00s saw the rise of iconic The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, plus some truly wild additions to the format (see: Beauty And The Geek, Room Raiders and, err, Date My Mom). But now, it feels like they’re *everywhere* again, and on every platform, from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to ITV. Shows have varying success rates; over a third of Love Is Blind couples were still together as of March 2022, while Naked Attraction, on the other hand? Err, much less successful, down at 2%. And yet we still dig our teeth into them, with the genre’s output growing more than ever. So what’s the appeal?
A genius formula
While dating shows are of course rooted in being ‘reality’, they’re often intertwined with a range of fictional elements that have us all hooked. After all, we all love a good rom-com, right? As Dr Karen McNally, a Reader in American Film, Television and Cultural History at London Metropolitan University explains, dating shows tick boxes across a range of our TV desires and expectations.
"They’re part-reality TV, part-soap opera, part-game show, which means that they’re combining elements of fiction and non-fiction, characterisation, relationships, melodrama, competition and aspiration that are very potent," she explains. And it’s true. The will-they-won’t-they wondering, the heartbreak we sense over catastrophic TV breakups; we feel the same about reality show contestants as we do fictional characters. And, in part down to social media, our collective understanding of what's real and what's not is continuously blurred.
Thanks to the impressive viewing figures and nature of TV programming, one show’s success seems to birth countless similar formats, much like we’ve seen across other genres. Just look at how true crime documentaries took over Netflix's Top 10, and the way talent competitions like The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent had a hold over Saturday night viewing in the 00s. Often, these trends are down to luck and popularity. “Suddenly something unexpectedly will catch fire and become a massive success,” explains Married At First Sight Commissioning Editor, Lee McMurray. “If one of them comes along that's very successful, then everyone sort of gets on the bandwagon.”
Still, that’s only one half of the story. So why more dating shows right now? “The ebb and flow of TV genres is largely driven by audience response,” says Dr McNally, “but behind such trends often lie cultural changes that prompt the increasing appeal of the genre,” - noting how dating shows have adapted to reflect (and arguably affect) our shifting cultural attitudes towards relationships. Think of dating apps, with their lineup of options to which you select ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and then Love Island, where the in-person recoupling lineup works much the same. On the flipside, the language used on dating shows has seeped back into our own vocabularies. I would have never used the phrases “putting all my eggs in one basket”, or “doing bits”, pre-Love Island, but now they're part of mine and my friends’ daily dating chat. When one guy asked if my mate’s head “could be turned,” I knew the symbiotic relationship ran deep.
As for our current position, research shows that more of us are single than ever. Quoting the Married At First Sight participants who’ve passed through his doors, Lee explains, “What we tend to hear from [the cast] is [that] it's never been harder. I think we live in a world now where there's a sort of paradox of choice in all areas,” he continues, referencing how dating apps have caused us to view partners more disposably. “So you've got all this choice and availability and accessibility to a pool of romantic partners, but it’s not made it easier. … [Participants] come to us to find a match and perhaps the viewers are feeling the same way and can relate to that.”
Love has no off season
So, in a world where it feels like more of a slog to find a lasting relationship, do we all just love to believe in the idea of, well, love? “I think the dating formats that tend to do the best, that come back year after year, are the formats that offer people joy and hope and optimism,” explains Lee. “[There’s a feeling of] it can happen to you and it could happen to these people.”
After all, love and relationships are up there with a handful of (almost) totally universal experiences, and is something we never get bored of talking about. Netflix said it themselves with their reality slate announcement tagline: ‘Love Has No Off Season’. And Lee agrees. “I think with dating, it's universal. We all want to find love. … Not everyone likes nature programmes, not everyone likes cookery shows but everyone knows what it's like to want to find love and to have a romantic life.” Of course, there are exceptions, with a whole spectrum of aromantic people rarely or never experiencing romantic attraction.
Still, Lee hones in on a specific scene between MAFS 2021 contestants Adam Aveling and Tayah Victoria, and the moment they fell in love on the aisle. Yes, there are risks and unpredictable elements with unscripted reality, “but when it works, you get an amazing love story. You couldn’t script that, we didn't see it coming,” he reminisces. “To capture that on camera is extraordinary; really beautiful and special." And that remains the same across the board; most recently with social media falling for Love Island’s Ekin-Su and Davide, as if they were fictional characters perfectly written for one another.
In a minefield of ghosting, benching, breadcrumbing and zombieing, sometimes a bit of hope and a (real-life) love story is what we all need.
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Dr Karen McNally is editor of ‘American Television during a Television Presidency’. Married At First Sight UK series seven airs later this year.
