Dating Game Show - Examples

Examples

The Newlywed Game, by contrast, another Barris show, had recently-married couples competing to answer questions about each others' preferences. The couple who knew each other the best would win. Sometimes others got divorced. Once, someone divorced after appearing on the Newlywed Game got a "second chance" on the Dating Game. Gimmicks were the lifeblood of all such shows. This drew criticisms for instigating disaffections that could not have been effected.

The genre waned for a while but The New Dating Game and the UK version Blind Date revived it, and the old shows were popular in reruns, unusual for any game show. Cable TV revived some interest in the 1980s and 1990s and eventually new shows began to be made along the old lines. Gay variations began to appear on a few specialty channels.

Other shows focused on the conventional blind date, where two people were set up and then captured on video, sometimes with comments or subtitles that made fun of their dating behaviour. He Said, She Said focused not on setting up the date, but on comparing the couple's different impressions afterwards, and for their cooperation offering to fund a second date. These resembled the reality shows that began to emerge at about the same time in the 1990s.

A completely new type of dating show merged it with the reality game show and produced shows where the emphasis was on realistic actions and tensions, but which used less realistic scenarios than the traditional blind date:

• Temptation Island, where long-standing heterosexual couples were deliberately separated and made to watch each other's mates interacting romantically on and after dates, making extensive use of video which is the only means by which they could communicate on the island.
• The Fifth Wheel, where four people, two of one sex and two of another, are allowed to meet and bond slightly, but then a fifth wheel of one or the other sex, but always a heterosexual, enters and attempts to break up the equilibrium.
• Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, which actually set up a real marriage, and put women in the situation of vying to marry a millionaire bachelor. The show turned into a major embarrassment for Fox, who aired the series. Soon after the couple married, the husband was found to have a domestic violence record. The woman quickly had the marriage annulled. Charges of economic materialism or demeaning to the woman have also been levelled.
• Joe Millionaire, which did likewise, with the twist that the bachelor was reputed to be a millionaire, but wasn't, although the cash prize offered by surprise at the end eventually made the deceptive scenario a bit less abusive.
• The Bachelor, where a single man got a chance to choose from a pool of 25 women, with eliminations over a period of several weeks; and The Bachelorette, which reversed the gender roles from The Bachelor. In the first two seasons of The Bachelorette, the last woman eliminated from the dating pool in the previous season of The Bachelor was given the opportunity to "turn the tables".