Reality Dating Shows: Anything but Reality

Reality TV: Networks adore it. Critics abhor it. The viewing public flocks to it like vultures to road kill. So what is all the fuss about?

Networks and producers love reality television for obvious reasons: Low production costs (by television standards) and high ratings. There are no "stars" pulling down seven-figures-per-episode salaries, no scripts (allegedly), and few, if any elaborate sets. Critics routinely savage reality shows for their lack of artistic merit or any other redeeming qualities. And what about the viewing public, you ask? It's simple, we love train wrecks. It seems that half the people want to be on the train, and the other half wants to watch the wreck.

One of the staples of reality television is the "dating show". Some think that reality dating shows are bad for relationships, as the shows often show the participants in a negative light. To this I say "Bunk". Reality dating programs have (at best) a tenuous grasp on reality. To illustrate this, let's take a look at a few popular reality dating shows.

The Bachelor: This is the seminal dating reality show; The Rose Bowl of reality dating. But it is hopelessly out of touch with reality. Raise your hand if your first date included flying in a helicopter to some remote, accessible only by air, canyon so you and your date could bungee jump from a bridge spanning said canyon. Perhaps you flew to Paris for a gourmet dinner on an otherwise abandoned Eiffel Tower, with the City of Light and its twinkling, romantic glory spread beneath you. Maybe you were a cheapskate, and went for a private champagne dinner for two at the top of Coit Tower in San Francisco.

Huh? Who lives like this?

This is not reality. This is a top production staff putting people in the most stimulating or romantic situations imaginable. It is light years removed from the reality of dirty socks, PMS, and toilet seats left up. Of course people are going to fall in love!

Full disclosure: I admit I once treated a lady to a Tour of Italy on our first date ($14.99 at The Olive Garden, now that is reality).

Further proof of this show's lack of reality is found in the dearth of marriages resulting from "proposals". After 14 seasons of The Bachelor, there has been exactly one wedding.

Is there anything approaching reality on this show? Perhaps there is. Take twenty-five women (hand-picked after multiple auditions to include as many different and conflicting personalities as possible) and put them under one roof with 24-hour access to a margarita machine. Ask these twenty-five women to compete for the attention and affection of an impossibly handsome man with a lucrative career. Put out a couple bowls of milk, roll the cameras and wait for the caterwauling to commence and the fur to fly. The premise is not realistic, but the result is.

The Bachelorette: The sister show to The Bachelor has also had one proposal end in marriage. And that wedding was not reality: ABC paid for the whole $4,000,000 shebang. That princely sum included the bride's $70,000 designer original dress (she also wore $1,000,000 worth of jewelry) and a $1,000,000 gift to the happy, and I do mean happy (!), couple. This is reality only if your last name happens to be Spielberg, or Rockefeller, but it's not bad for a stay-at-home mom and a firefighter.

Tough Love: In this "reality" dating show, an expert matchmaker and his psychologist mother run a dating "boot camp" for relationship-challenged women. The women are put through a series of dating exercises, and then have their performances critiqued. As expected, someone always ends up in tears, or spewing profanity normally reserved for hockey locker rooms.

The participants on the most recent season included (among others) the following misfits:

1. A self-styled rocker chick in her mid thirties, who wrote God-awful songs and dressed and behaved like a teenage biker.

2. A former overweight girl who arrived at camp after losing eighty-plus pounds. She did not lose about three-hundred pounds of low-self esteem baggage, and a need for a full service team of therapists.

3. A thirty-something bartender/party-girl with a penchant for alcohol abuse, self destructive relationships, and bad-boys. Lots of potential there!

4. A gold-digging hustler, who dates under an assumed name and alter-ego.

5. A returning failure from the previous season. She is convinced she is the sexiest woman on the planet, and that all the other women hate her because they are jealous.

You see where this is going? Quite the realistic cross-section of American womanhood, isn't it? This is not reality. This is a freak show. This is a ten car pile-up waiting to happen.

We are attracted to shows like this because watching makes us feel better about ourselves. As in: "Wow, my life is not perfect, but I am not as messed up as those loons." Hopefully true, but that does not make it real.

Frank the Entertainer: A Basement Affair: This one will be short and sweet. Frank is a nice guy. He's a thirty-one-year-old man is looking for love. So far, so good. Oh, did I mention his claim to fame is having appeared as a resident dope on three other reality shows? Did I also mention he is unemployed and lives in his parents' basement? Did I also forget to mention his overbearing mother? She is actually the best part of the show.

Fifteen women move into his parents' house and compete for Frank's love. Yeah, that's going to happen in the real world. Are there fifteen women on the planet who are desperate to attract an unemployed guy that lives in his folks' basement? Is there a mother who is going to let fifteen other women comandeer her household? I think not!

Millionaire Matchmaker: The producers of this show would have viewers believe that all millionaires are shallow, ill-tempered, self-obsessed, egomaniacal narcissists with all sorts of bizarre personality quirks. It is either that or they are like the towering NBA player with a huge contract and a personality rivaling Styrofoam.

Hey, wait a minute. Maybe this is real.

Tool Academy: I am not certain that this mess qualifies as a dating show. It may be more of a "relationship" show. Whatever it is, I am certain that if alien beings pirated the cable signal and stumbled across this "reality" show they would do one of the following:

1. Hit the hyperspace button and hightail it to a distant galaxy poste haste.

2. Target the blue planet for annihilation ASAP.

Why would they do such a thing?

They would destroy us because this show is a virtual circus of human dysfunction populated with philandering miscreants, reprobates, napoleon complexes, and intellectually and morally deficient meatpiles. I have lived over fifty years on this earth without ever encountering boneheads of this magnitude. I cannot imagine how many rocks must be turned to cast this program.

The long-suffering partner of one losing "contestant" on this show decided her prospects were better as one of Tiger Woods mistresses. That worked out well. True story and enough said.

All of this is not to disparage these programs and others like them. As entertainment, they pander to our instinctive voyeurism. As entertainment, they are often quite amusing. But they all present some combination of unrealistic premises, unrealistic situations, unrealistic characters, and unrealistic expectations. That is okay. The public is not interested in watching folks going out to a movie, bowling, stuffing dogs in their mouths at ball-games or any of the myriad other things real people do on dates.

It is simple entertainment. As such there is nothing real about reality dating shows, and certainly nothing that should be "bad" for relationships in the world outside the hypno-box.