The 2003 Bravo series Boy Meets Boy, for instance, took the straightforward premise of The Bachelor and applied an ethically dubious twist: The gay leading man, James, and his heterosexual best friend, Andra, initially had no idea that the mix of suitors competing for James’s heart on national television included both gay and straight men. In an entertainment landscape that so clearly prized interpersonal chaos, the introduction of LGBTQ story lines was unsurprisingly salacious. MTV’s first “dating reality series,” Singled Out, aired from 1995–98, but within the next decade, shows like DisMissed, Parental Control, Flavor of Love, and Next had effectively gamified love and public attention: Even if contestants didn’t charm the objects of their affection, their outrageous behavior often enthralled viewers. Many of these shows weren’t explicitly dating-focused ( The Real World, Road Rules, Room Raiders), but several MTV and VH1 romantic-competition series attracted wide audiences. On Are You the One?’s own network, MTV, a surge of programming that depicted non-celebrities interacting sloppily with one another shifted the television landscape. With the exception of Netflix’s quietly revelatory Dating Around, many dating shows with LGBTQ (and especially bisexual) contestants have treated them as hypersexual or prurient anomalies, as enigmas who are incapable of settling down.Ĭonsider, for example, the reality-TV boom of the late ’90s and early aughts. They’re people who are messy and queer-not messy because they’re queer. Though the series doesn’t eschew boozed-up romantic drama, it never plays its participants’ sexual orientations as the source of spectacle. In this, Are You the One? offers a refreshing divergence from many past incarnations of LBGTQ-focused dating shows. Cast members introduce themselves with backstories that account for upbringings spent in the closet or involve being the only publicly queer kid in middle school. Like the hyper-branded festivities it coincided with, the show is a fascinating tonal mashup: The episodes that have aired thus far weave lessons about sexuality and gender (and the politics of dating while queer) into every element of the show. The new season of Are You the One? premiered right at the tail end of June- Pride Month. For heterosexual audiences, it’s didacticism wrapped in an alcohol-soaked reality-TV bow, while for LGBTQ viewers, it’s an opportunity to be seen-for better or worse-more intimately than many dating shows have previously allowed. This new installment, though, serves a multi-layered purpose. Prior seasons of Are You the One? had been standard, unscripted fare: entertaining but vacuous.
#GAY DATING SHOW CASTING 2019 TV#
In a highlight clip that finds the cast explaining why their season-and representation of queer people on television-is so important, one member offered a straightforward assessment: “If you have a reality TV show that includes the entire spectrum of, like, racial, sexual, and gender identities, you’re gonna have a really interesting show!” And he’s right-the season is already among the show’s best. Each of the 16 cast members in its eighth season is, in the show’s preferred parlance, “sexually fluid.” There are eight pairs of perfect matches, but the contestants (and viewers) cannot assume they’ll fall along heteronormative lines. Now the diabolical series, which premiered in 2014, has introduced a new element to the equation.
“You’re here because you all have one thing in common: You suck at relationships.” Naturally, chaos always ensued.
“Welcome to the most ambitious matchmaking experiment ever attempted,” then-host Ryan Devlin told the starry-eyed singles. They were diverse in geographic and racial background but uniformly young, brash, attractive, and heterosexual. In each of the show’s first seven seasons, 20 singles (and sometimes an additional wild card or two) were put through a “ rigorous matchmaking process” and chosen to live together in a massive house.
The MTV reality dating series Are You the One? pairs the pursuit of romance with a pretty sweet deal: If every one of the show’s contestants correctly identifies their “perfect match,” the group splits a grand prize of $1 million.