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(Host Lance Bass possessed all the shiny, plastic charisma of a grocery store green apple.) It was mostly notable for its lack of drama and bad cast.
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More recently, Logo’s 2016 The Bachelor knockoff Finding Prince Charming was so in thrall to its straight counterpart - indicated by the casting of the bland, if well-built, Prince Charming - that it failed to establish its own identity. (She chose the guy in the first season, and later claimed she was never bisexual and was simply “ gay for pay.” Since then she also seemed to become a Nazi sympathizer.) But it hewed to a similar logic, in which 16 straight men and 16 lesbians competed for Tila’s affections, with the curveball being that the contestants were not aware of her bisexuality. MTV’s own 2007 offering, A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila, was the rare reality show featuring an Asian American star. But we felt by putting in, we would get a much broader audience.” As the show’s gay producer and creator, Douglas Ross, admitted at the time, “If it were just a gay dating show, for sure we'd get a lot of gay viewers, probably not that many straight, some looky-loos. The show’s driving question became whether the titular “boy” would be able to tell the straights from the gays. But the plot’s reductive pretense revolved around the fact that some of the suitors were secretly straight. Boy Meets Boy, which aired in 2003 on Bravo, involved a Bachelor-style butch gay guy finding love among 15 suitors. Queerness on reality dating shows has mostly been treated superficially, like with the trope of the sudden reveal. Now Are You the One? is challenging the dating genre’s conventions, foregrounding experiences and conversations about love, desire, and relationships from a nonheteronormative perspective that, in today’s pop cultural landscape, are still rare.
#THERES GOING TO BE AN ALL GAY DATING SHOW TV#
The concept of sexual fluidity itself is often deployed in reality TV as a strategy through which shows can hint at queerness for mainstream viewers - without actually exploring queer culture outside a straight gaze. But in the current, eighth, iteration of the show, which debuted June 26, MTV flipped the shtick by including only sexually fluid participants who are attracted to all genders, so that, in the parlance of promotional materials, anything goes!ĭespite the somewhat sensationalizing premise and its potential land mines, the resulting show - four episodes in - is already one of the more provocative entries in reality dating TV, where queerness has previously been treated as the topic of a “special episode” add-on or as a scandalous plot twist. If they figure out all the correct pairings before the end of the season, the housemates will win a million dollars.įor the past seven seasons, the men have been paired with women, and women with men. The cast enacts physical embodiments of the hell of dating, such as races where participants jump over obstacles labeled with problems like “fear of commitment.” Winners of these challenges are rewarded with one-on-one dates and the opportunity to vote on whom they think is a “true” pair. The housemates themselves have to figure out the “true love” couplings by undertaking a bunch of elaborate activities. The twist: Using old-school matchmaking techniques and complex algorithms, dating experts have paired the housemates with their supposed “ideal” mates, but neither the cast nor the viewers know the matches. A bunch of young singles are thrown together in a house, set in the kind of tropical paradise required for finding true love on television. Like all dating reality show franchises, MTV’s Are You the One? has a shtick.