Page 134 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

d

dating shows

From The Dating Game and Love Connection, to Temptation Island, The Bachelor,
and I Love New York, dating games have been a staple of television for many
years, offering mild fun, occasional titillation, and scripts of romance to be or
not to be. Many have been resoundingly criticized for their normalization of
heterosexual romance, and for the roles that they seemingly propose that men
and women play in real life’s dating games, but some have also been praised for
opening up a space on television in which gender norms and expectations can
be challenged, played with, and interrogated.

hisTory
While today’s post-Bachelor explosion of dating games might suggest that
the genre is relatively new to television, the genre “dates” back to the 1970s’
The Dating Game and its 1980s copycat, Love Connection, both of which asked
singles to select from a group of three suitors based on a series of rather staged
questions and even more staged answers. Audience members could laugh at the
inappropriate answers or suitors, or root for the “right” connection, and thus
the genre neatly married comedy and romance, offering idle fun in half-hour
chunks.
A new sort of dating show then began with the rise of reality television pro-
gramming in the late 1990s. Blind Date’s cameras followed dates, while produc-
ers added snarky comments and criticism in the form of animated pop-ups,
supposed thought bubbles, or analysis by a range of commentators in a com-
ment bar at the bottom of the screen. Also, since Blind Date was sold to fill late

3