Programming Profile

Dating reality shows can be both cost-effective for broadcasters and rekindle things with that seemingly lost youth audience. But what are the next innovations in this crowded genre?

When once television’s big unscripted pull was music and talent formats, with Idol, Got Talent, X Factor and others dominating Saturday nights in the UK and midweek primetime in the US, commissioners these days are increasingly falling for dating reality shows. Whether it’s Married at First Sight (MAFS), First Dates, Too Hot to Handle, Love is Blind or even the rather icky MILF Manor, broadcast/terrestrial networks, cablenets and streamers alike cannot get enough of this buzzy genre.

There’s a very ‘traditional television’ reason for this: you can make a lot of episodes for a relatively small amount of money and strip shows night after night through your schedules, particularly in the often tricky summer period. ITV2 in the UK shows the local version of Love Island for 57 nights consecutively and the most recent season of Nine Network’s Married at First Sight Australia ran to 36 episodes of up to 90 minutes each.

But the genre also solves a very modern problem for broadcasters: it draws the wayward younger demographics back to linear broadcast networks and their streaming services. Event episodes like MAFS’s weekly dinner parties or commitment ceremonies, I Kissed a Boy’s ‘kiss off,’ or Love Island’s public votes and evictions also demand audiences watch live to avoid spoilers and contribute to the wave of social media discourse as it happens.

So why is this genre punching through? This was a major topic of discussion at this year’s Edinburgh TV Festival (ETVF) in late August, during a session titled Dating Formats: Never Enough.

Daisy Lilley, Netflix’s director of unscripted in the UK, who has Too Hot to Handle, The Ultimatum and Love is Blind on her slate, said: “Dating is one of those things that punches through because it’s universal and people see themselves in the people on screen.”

Fiona Campbell, controller of youth audience at the BBC, which aired gay dating show I Kissed a Boy on BBC Three to much fanfare this year, added: “Everybody wants to find love. It is hard; break-ups can be more brutal now. Any content that can help you navigate that and make you feel better and not alone is a good thing. There are a plethora of dating apps and a huge appetite across a variety of people to find ‘the one’ and we’re making shows within that market. There is a big audience out there for these shows.”

That toxicity in modern dating, despite there being more platforms than ever before to help you find a partner, is also front and centre for Lee McMurray, commissioning editor at Channel 4, which broadcasts First Dates and will shortly debut Banijay’s Australian format Love Triangle on its youth channel E4.

“It’s never been harder to find love,” he said. “You hear it through cast and contributors on all the shows. It’s a minefield out there with the catfishing, ghosting, the toxic apps. It’s hard to find somebody ready, willing and wanting to find a deep connection. It’s a predicament that affects a lot of people and they want to see that reflected on screen. These shows, as well as reflecting that reality and what people are feeling about their own love lives, can give them hope. You can get a lot of guidance and advice, from the experts on MAFS, for example, there is a lot of backdoor take-out from it.”

So what are the ingredients that make a good show in this area, other than “backdoor take-out”?

“There are a handful of essential ingredients that a lot of these shows will share,” McMurray said. “It won’t surprise anybody that when we do audience research the biggest word in the word cloud, 10 times bigger than any other, is ‘drama.’ There is an addictive quality to the shows when they’re on every night and run for weeks on end; you get invested and sucked in.

Authenticity is another big one – increasingly the viewer is savvy and more sophisticated than they’ve been before because they consume so much of this content. They want to believe the people in the process are invested because if they don’t care why should you?

“With a lot of these shows there are quite high stakes – with MAFS they’re marrying a complete stranger. The cast is key. And escapism – they’re very glossy and glamorous.”

The line between drama and toxicity is a difficult one to tread. ITV’s version of Love Island has, tragically, lost two previous contestants to suicide, as well as the show’s host, Caroline Flack. This year’s contestants had their social media accounts taken away from them for the duration of the show for the first time so they couldn’t read the comments and DMs.
 

However, ITV chief Kevin Lygo’s defence at ETVF in 2021 that participants are “psychoanalysed to death” as part of ITV’s standards and practices was, kindly put, an unfortunate turn of phrase. One trend is for television in general, and these shows in particular, to be a little, well, kinder.

“There is a version of Too Hot to Handle that could be quite nasty,” Netflix’s Lilley admitted. “These are incorrigible people, constantly making mistakes, treating the opposite sex like shit every now and again. The team work so hard to find people you can still root for. They make mistakes and you can’t believe they’ve done it, but you still love them.

“For our dating shows we do tend to lean into heart and humour. Of course, you have the drama, and we love the drama because relationships are messy. Sometimes things aren’t straightforward, they do go a bit grey and off in other directions. At the heart of it, we go for people whose heart is in the right place. I hope you can see that in our shows.”

McMurray agreed that casting is more important than ever. “Authenticity is key,” he said. “If people don’t believe they’re in the process for love then the audience can smell it, they react to it and they don’t like it.

“You can tolerate a certain number of people who want to be on TV in the cast. You do need people who can deliver and give you good television and know what buttons to press to deliver engaging content and good scenes. But by and large, what you want is people who really care and want to be there to find love, so the emotions are authentic.”

As much a part of watching the shows themselves is the social media activity and chatter that goes with them. Campbell at the BBC said: “BBC Three’s recent heritage is digital content and on-demand, and iPlayer is the primary home. The ethos of the channel and team is all about how we drive people from off-platform to a show and our team is expert in that.

“From the very first pitch meetings we’re talking about campaigns and then the social team comes in and is integrated with the production company to bring it to life. For dating shows, we’re always trying to focus on to the original proposition of this idea that will make it stand out in such a healthy market. I Kissed a Boy was very distinct and we were fixing on what we could do off-platform from the first minute. We ended up with 34 million social impressions for a first season from a standing start and launching around Eurovision, which posed a real risk of drowning it out with the target audience.”

Campbell credits show host Dannii Minogue’s involvement on socials and engaging the LGBTQ+ audience she already attracts with helping to drive that. The social team also posted preview clips on gay dating app Grindr.

Netflix obviously lacks the live element, as opposed to Love Island’s appointment-to-view on ITV2 each night, but Lilley said socials can help with this. “The fans of Too Hot to Handle and Love Is Blind are so loud and you see that on socials immediately,” she said. “As that happens it drives people to watch the show and ‘eventise’ it. At Netflix, we can play around with the scheduling and release of the shows, which gives us a chance to keep the conversation going and make sure people watch the final together and help people feel like part of a community.”

Charlie Irwin, MD of Fremantle prodco Thames, previously worked on X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent and now produces Too Hot to Handle for Netflix. “The Too Hot digital team work hard to keep that going. People come to the show at different times. Yes, you hope you have the majority of viewers at the time but with Too Hot you see people pick it up through the years, so the conversation keeps going and spiking at different times.”

Mike Spencer, the exec producer of Love Island as part of his role as creative director at ITV Studios’ Lifted Entertainment, said this can be key to avoiding viewer fatigue, because while you want to freshen up the shows, you mess with their core format at your peril.

“You make the show because viewers love it. But in last year’s version you could sort of guess what was coming next and for season nine we said we absolutely cannot have the islanders guessing what’s next,” Spencer said. “You have to have your core format but we’ve tested little tweaks. Surprises and twists in the format are good – don’t take it a million miles away but keep it feeling fresh, so the islanders and viewers don’t know what’s coming next. We’ve moved away from cliffhangers as the viewers have got more and more savvy.”

Irwin added: “In any successful format you need a small twist and unique selling point that makes it stand out. In Too Hot, they’re banned from sexual contact and that’s the name of the game. Beneath it is an authentic question about whether people can find deep and meaningful relationships and love without the lust and sex that we all think dating is. That’s the small unique point for us. It’s relatable.

“You always look to freshen up series but the underlying format in question has to remain the same. The viewer has to know what they’re coming to the show for. In Too Hot, it’s a sex ban and testing people; that will never be messed with.”

So what’s the next turn of the wheel in a packed genre? Spencer points to forthcoming ITV format My Mum Your Dad, which features an older generation seeking love as a potential new trend.

Campbell said she’s frequently receiving complicated pitches with multiple format points that lose the room. “Think clearly about what you’ve got that’s special and make it easy to understand and get – it needs to be super-simple and memorable,” she added.

Lilley cited Netflix’s recent show The Ultimatum, where people who were already in a medium- or long-term relationship faced challenges and questions about whether to keep going, as an interesting direction of travel. “With queer dating, what you don’t want to do is commission something tokenistic. The Ultimatum was a great format with people at a crossroads in their lives, and why couldn’t it have a queer cast in the same way it could have a straight cast?”

McMurray at Channel 4 was very keen on that show too. “A lot of the shows we talk about are about the beginning of things, because it’s joy, hope, optimism; you haven’t learned to hate each other yet,” he said. “What is trickier is grappling with existing relationships, people who’ve been together a while. I’d be keen to hear from people who have formats that speak to that.

“We’re looking to commission high-volume, returnable formats and there’s no reason why one of those couldn’t be dating. They need to be distinctive, original somehow, with a USP, headline, thought or concept at the heart that makes it stand out. For us, it needs to be high-stakes, ambitious, audacious and extraordinary – marrying a stranger, forming a ‘thruple.’ Be punchy.

“It has to be distinctive. There are some formats that feel derivative and the same as everything else out there. There has to be something original.”