Polite Disinterest Island

Or: How I would Run a Reality Dating Show | Vol. 3 Iss. 10

No I’m not watching Love Island or Bachelor in Paradise, I’m just listening to extensive recap podcasts about every single episode of both.

My Credentials for This Job

I watched Hannah Brown’s season of the Bachelorette in 2019, as well as most of Jenn Tran’s season last year. I don’t think I’ve ever made it more than a couple episodes into a Bachelor season.

I once watched part of a season of Love Island UK, but 50 episodes is ridiculous and I gave up and googled the ending.

I watched at least one season of Too Hot to Handle and possibly part of a second.

I’m married and my parents have been married for nearly 35 years, which is not a credential but on The Bachelor they act like it is.

Objective: Chaos

I would make a show that is as ridiculous as possible while still being enjoyable for the audience to watch and hopefully creating couples that can last more than a week.

Enjoyable to watch is important because if a show is not enjoyable I will simply google the spoilers and stop watching. Or, in the case of Gossip Girl, watch the pilot and the series finale and then be on my merry way.

Love, then, is about the journey, and keeping the Nielsen ratings reasonable from start to finish. (Or the streaming equivalent? In my mind, this show airs live on NBC and then next day online, but we’ll shop it around if necessary.)

But I do also care about the ending. Because when couples consistently break up, usually because a man did something abjectly horrible, it starts to make the journey feel a little pointless.

Good Bones

Our host, actor and comedian Steve Buscemi, introduces us to five main singles. My hope is that having five helps with a couple common dating show problems.

Number one, it insures the show against a boring lead. If you’re one of five, less of the show rests on your shoulders.

Number two, it means that every season can have a diverse leading cast, including the thing that almost all the main dating shows pretend is hard but isn’t: queer stories.

In addition to the five leads, there would be a pool of people for them to date. They’re not divided up by person, at least initially.

Could some of them be more interested in each other than in the leads? Yes, and that’s okay, for a couple of reasons. Number one, I love mess, and would be working toward my stated objective of chaos. Number two, if the point of the show is love, then it should be okay for couples to form outside the structure of the show. And number three, only the leads can decide who stays on the show. Which means if you fall in love with a fellow contestant, your love story has an obstacle, and if you then choose to pursue the lead anyway, you have an ulterior motive!

Could the leads fall for each other? Maybe so! Could they get in a fight because they’re interested in the same person? Also yes. See above chaos and love reasons why these are both okay.

They all live in neighboring apartments in the same building, which means you can spy on who’s going into whose room, for drama. They also compete in challenges/dates (more on that below) and spend less structured hanging out time in the common spaces of the building or at large, slightly passive-aggressive dinner parties.

The leads have to agree on who to send home week to week. This wouldn’t start until three episodes in, so there are no first night gimmick people who didn’t get a real chance. The pool would also start smaller than it does on some shows - maybe 20 people total for all the leads. Which is still a good number of people to choose from to date, but it would allow the pool of contestants to be more fleshed out characters.

The leads whittle down the group until there are just a couple options left, and then they move out of the building and back into their real lives. More, again, on that later.

From Villains to Enemies

One of the hallmarks of the reality dating show is the Villain, who is usually Not Here to Make Friends or, worse, Here for the Wrong Reasons. This person is then bullied on the internet, either because they were genuinely a bad person or because they were edited to make it look that way.

I would like to posit a transition from villains to enemies. That is, instead of casting or editing one person to look terrible, setting up two (or more) people to be in a feud in which the audience can side with either.

Ideally, these people would also be a little bit attracted to each other.

I would cast people to be enemies for each other. Some of these would be people specifically engineered to get on each other’s nerves. So, if someone were casting my enemy, they would pick someone who hates musical theatre and talks exclusively in jokes copied from the internet.

But for other people, I would find their real life enemy and cast both of them but not tell them in advance. Importantly, these would not be enemies who have done anything actually bad. Abusive exes are banned. But your old high school classmate who beat you out for class president senior year through a series of mud slinging ads in the local paper? Cast immediately.

Will the audience take sides in these petty battles to the death (elimination from reality dating program)? Probably. But in editing, my production team and I would try to make battles as even as possible. Both people should be a little bit wrong. (While I love musical theatre and no longer have a twitter account, I do sometimes just read the headline of a news article and I think the SEC is fundamentally better at football. Argue with the wall.)

Definitely Secret Spies

But enemies won’t be the only familiar faces in the crowd. We. Need. Girl Groups.

The idea here is that the leads are cast along with a couple of friends who are in the contestant pool, but at least at first they don’t tell the other cast members that they know each other. That way, they can form a network of spies!

I guess the guys could do this too, but my hope would be that as a team, women could better suss out which people are Pure of Heart (or the reality dating show equivalent) by comparing notes. Relatedly, everyone has access to the internet. My production team is full of former investigative journalists who did very good background checks, but contestants and leads can still go on people’s social media and judge each other.

Also, and you may notice a theme here on my reality dating show, but it’s possible some of the spies/friends admitted to the casting producers that they’re… a little bit attracted to each other. Will the contestants think it’s fair if a lead already knows someone and has a tiny crush? Probably not! Seems like a great reason to be enemies!

Will the audience like it if there are the seeds of a friends to lovers plot already planted from episode one? Yes, I think they will.

Better Dates, Better Love Stories

Anybody could fall in love if they’re on a beautiful beach with nothing to worry about, or in a hot air balloon in Paris dreaming of all the spon con money they’re going to make.

But this dating show isn’t romantic.

Leads would choose people they’re interested to go on dates with, except the first part of the date is a challenge!

Possible challenges include:

• Going to the grocery store at five o’clock on a Sunday.

  • Do I mean a fake empty grocery store? No. It is so crowded.

  • Do I mean a Midwest grocery store with wide aisles and twenty-five kinds of cereal? No, it’s so small and you have to go down an escalator and then walk all your groceries home.

• Filing a tax return.

  • Oh, you don’t want to talk about money? We might get married at the end of this! We have to talk about money. (Probably no one will get married at the end, but they might eventually.)

  • Your accountant does your taxes? You don’t remember where you saved your AGI from last year? You’ve been itemizing but you should be taking the standard deduction! This is the most dramatic season ever.

• Planning a dinner party

  • All those groceries? You have to cook them for a large group of people, who will be here in an hour and a half, and the bathroom is still not clean.

  • Oh no, no one has taught you how to cook? That seems like an oversight that might put more labor on your partner. Probably the next hour and a half is a great time to deal with that.

  • Also, surprise surprise, some of the guests at this dinner party are friends and relatives who have difficult questions. Politics! Sex! Religion! Which deductions you were itemizing for, which seems weird to my uncle, who is an accountant!

After these challenges the people can go on a real date, which would mostly include sitting on the couch and debriefing about why they yelled at each other about the 2017 tax law and what kind of cereal to buy.

Could it also involve talking about things that have happened to them in the past? Probably, because that’s how talking to people works, but there shouldn’t be manufactured dumps of the worst thing that ever happened to you. In fact, if you don’t want to talk about how your parent was eaten by a shark on your birthday in front of you, you don’t have to.

And even if you did want to share, you’d have spent more time with the lead due to the smaller cast size and the apartment building situation, so it wouldn’t be the only conversation you’ve had.

Is it possible some of these grocery store/tax return/talking about your past on the couch dates could end with sex? Maybe. There’s no fantasy suite in this show. There are apartments, all in the same building.

So yes, some people might have sex. And sometimes, that would be a really good thing. And sometimes it might also complicate other relationships on the show. The leads aren’t immune to the good things or the problems. And neither are the contestants. Sex would be part of the chaos and the love, both of which further my Nielsen ratings.

Happily (?) Ever After

The last three episodes or so of the show would be set in the real world. Most of the cast would be living in the same city (shout out Love is Blind, which I also didn’t watch but listened to a recap of), though to get in some of the real life friends and enemies we might bring in people who currently live somewhere else.

That means those three episodes would be steeped in the people’s real friends and families, in the news of the day, and in the actual challenges of being a couple in the world. And in that setting, each lead would have to navigate their relationships with one or two people they’re interested in.

There is no set ending, because I don’t want the ends of these relationships to feel predetermined.

However, I’d hope to have set people up to actually be in love. They would have spent real time together, including in their actual lives outside the show. They would have relied on their friends, families, and spies, to help them make decisions that made sense. They would even have talked about why it would make sense for them to file jointly once they got married, except in the District of Columbia where to get the maximum benefits you should actually use married filing separately on the same return.

The finale would probably have break-ups. It would probably have some people who are better off as friends. It might have a proposal, if people are feeling the fast lane. But my dream is that it would have people who’ve found something real they want to continue, and can talk about their love and the person they’ve found who was once their enemy but has come around on the musical theatre thing, in a way that I can set a good score behind and make the audience cry.

Thank you for reading all that.

NBC, call me.

What Else?

A Daring Escape

Last weekend, Roxie saved us from a bear. I do not have a picture of the bear because we were too busy very briskly exiting that particular area of the woods.

Will and I were hanging out in the woods in the mountains in Virginia, soaking our feet in a cold spring, when Roxie started barking. We looked over to see something moving through the trees. At first we thought it was a person, because it was on its hind legs, but then Will saw the ears and, shoes off, we booked it out of there.

Will’s water bottle was lost in the course of our escape. It belongs to the bear now.

Scrabble

Will got me a Scrabble set for my birthday, which we cracked open on the Virginia trip. Here is a picture of a game I won.

Not pictured: the game earlier this week in which I played all seven on my second turn, for 69 points, and then proceeded to have no fewer than 5 i’s at once later in the game and lose.

Reading

I’m reading along with Catherine’s Proust book club, which started this week. I’m enjoying it so far. Will is five books and a year ahead, but his recommendations are also positive.

After this picture of no Proust, taken at Capitol Hill Books, I found an e-book of Swann’s Way at the library.