When Are You The One? returned to MTV this month for a seventh season, it did so with all the predictable tropes of the reality dating subgenre. There was Zak, the Toxic Relationship Addict. Kayla, the Guy-Crazy Romantic. Kwasi, the Muscled Egomaniac. Sam, the Independent Feminist. Tevin, the Too-Suave Pretty Boy. All were reductive archetypes; all were irrestistible.
The primary architecture of the show, too, adheres to a simple, if effective formula: throw a group of beautiful, sex-drunk souls into a house, add endless amounts of liquor, stir, and wait for the drama to spill over. It’s a social experiment disguised as a dating show. And, like the best dating shows, it melds fact and fantasy into something that's more like the real thing than you might expect.
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In 2016, I began obsessively watching the MTV franchise—then in season 4—as a form of self-care. I was in search of easy detachments from the nonstop barrage of daily life, with its personal and professional glitches; mindless reality TV worked like the perfect tranquilizer, helping to momentarily alleviate the disquiet that rattled around me. AYTO was a mirage, and there was solace in its fabrication, in the spectacle and riot it made out of love. If real life had become too defeating, perhaps there was something I could discern from the unreal.
I don’t consider myself a reality TV junkie, but there is a unique magic to the genre’s dating shows I find especially intoxicating. In my 32 years, I’ve failed—spectacularly, foolishly—at fortifying any semblance of true romance. It’s partly why I’m enthralled by this particular breed of show.
The early-aughts run of mid-tier reality dating staples—Blind Date (UPN), Change of Heart (syndicated), Next (MTV), and Paradise Hotel (Fox)—exposed me to the genre’s saccharine chaos. I was a teenager completely, and oddly, enraptured by the romantic failures of grownups. It didn't take long to see through its pretense of realness, though. But such is the nature of TV that hinges on confession and courtship, where authenticity is a matter of perception: we yearn for the big reveal no matter how hollow it turns out to be, no matter how quickly we puncture its illusion. The consumption of these shows became my own secret diet. I devoured them without a thought.
In Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, Lucas Mann writes of the genre’s inherent polarity. “In proximity, the two words begin to chip away at each other’s meaning. Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility: transforming facts to the level of the spectacular.” Then and now, I find myself striving for the opposite of this: I hope to whittle the spectacular into fact, to mold the exaggerated into a shield against imminent failures of the heart.
With its choreographed sentimentality and the promise of emotional sabotage, Are You The One? exploits a uniform TV framework but offers a twist. The conceit of the show tests science against free will. MTV picks “22 singles who suck at love”—11 women and 11 men; like most reality dating shows it’s stubbornly heteronormative—and puts them in a house for a given number of weeks (typically no more than two months). Before AYTO contestants can enter the house, however, they must consent to a detailed matchmaking test, whereupon producers secretly pair the most compatible guys and girls. Once in the house, through a series of drunken social encounters and challenges, contestants have to find their “perfect match.” Emotions bubble and froth, arguments are had, and by the finale, with $1 million on the line, the goal is to have all the perfect matches coupled together.
Having to find one’s “perfect match” in such a truncated, high-stakes time frame forces contestants into a continual state of exchange: through conversation, through sex, through fighting. This reciprocity often translates like Twitter or Instagram, with its never-ending circus of communication between users and its manufactured gaze: we enact a performative identity so that others might see us as we wish to be seen.
Kelli Korducki, writing in Real Life about ABC’s Bachelor franchise, pointed to the sticky parallels between reality TV and social media. “Any person with an Instagram account can confirm that it’s pleasing to see people as they desire to be seen, even while knowing that the proffered glimpse is curatorial at the least.” But it doesn’t typically play out like that on a show like AYTO. What I’ve come to love particularly about the various, and very cheesy, reality dating series, above other reality TV subgenres, is how contestants seem less polished; there is a loss of control that, at some point, overtakes the show—one contestants seem to willfully embrace.
And so reality becomes a fantasy for us, and a dark fiction for the contestant. The gulf between the image on screen and our interpretation of it, as Mann points to in his book, expands and contracts, and pleasure—at least, the pleasure I’ve found in such shows—arises from what we choose to hook our hopes, fears, and desires into.
In April, Hulu acquired Love Island, the popular UK reality dating show that just ended its fourth season. As with AYTO, I’ve become consumed by it. Unlike AYTO, though, it’s a show of shameless, indulgent excess: seasons run 34-57 episodes, each is an hour long, and it airs six nights a week over the summer. (I’ve made my way through the first two seasons.)
What transpires on screen has less of a maximalist feel: five guys and five girls live and sleep together in a mansion in Majorca. (Even if couples don’t share a romantic spark, they must still share a bed). They drink, bicker over easily-resolved miscommunications, and occasionally compete in embarrassing challenges. Not a lot happens. Every few days the public votes contestants in and out of the house, and the lone surviving couple wins a lump sum of cash. But Love Island is not without its cracks. The show is a brash representation of its predecessors: all but one or two of the contestants are white and thin, and everyone is aggressively straight. It’s a stark reminder of how archaic the subgenre remains. (Are You the One? is reportedly seeking “sexually fluid” castmembers for its next season, however.)
For the longest, I told myself, there was emotional sustenance to be mined from Are You The One? and Love Island. In front of me was profound advice—on how to open up, or how to better communicate—but only if I watched long and intently, spinning their obvious failures into tangible lessons.
But I don’t know if this is true any more, or if it ever was. Maybe I just wished it was for my own sake. I now realize what mesmerizes me isn’t the wisdom of these shows, but their brazen emptiness. It’s what I’ve come to enjoy the most. They manufacture authenticity not into a utopian form of devotion or unattainable love—there are no perfect relationships on display—but into a messy vision of affection and longing.
The pursuit of love is an imperfect, chaotic endeavor. Scripted stories strive to acknowledge that in their own way, whether syrupy melodramas and meet-cute rom-coms—but it’s the ersatz verité of these gaudy dating shows that fully captures the shaggy unpredictability of passion and partnership. In all their contrived falsity, they manage to be more alive, more true, than anything else on TV.