Dating in the Dark premieres at 10:02 EDT/9:02 CDT tonight on ABC.
Dating in the Dark pretty much plays like someone at Endemol (your reality TV overlords) sat back, furrowed their brows and wondered how they could update The Dating Game. Don’t get me wrong, folks. I do enjoy me some Dating Game. There’s something terrifically rigid about the format, about testing whether it’s really our nether regions or our brains that we think with (sadly, it seems to be usually the former), plus its close cousin The Newlywed Game gave us, “That’d be the butt, Bob,” which is, y’know, something that comes up often in everyday conversation. All of Chuck Barris’ game shows grasp at something primal within us and make that tangible and real, and that’s why people keep copying them.
And make no mistake. Dating in the Dark is a straight-up copy. They toss in a bunch of other stuff, like a light-sealed room and an infrared camera and a computer that matches people with their perfect matches (like, uh, eHarmony, I guess?) and SKETCH ARTISTS, but they never drift away from that central question of whether we’re going to think with our heads or our HEADS, if y’know what I mean. It’s a show where the voiceover guy proclaims, momentously, “Coming up next: Everyone hands over their shirts,” and we’re supposed to think that’s an awesome, awesome twist.
The show is hosted by Rossi Morreale in the grim, humorless way that all hosts of these sorts of shows employ. I don’t know what it is about the Endemol house style that demands that their hosts act as though these shows are determining deeply worrying things about the fate of the universe, but Morreale is pretty good at that house style. He’s the only one with access to both sides of the house, the bridge between the men and the women who don’t get to actually see each other, meeting instead in a completely darkened room, where they’re allowed to go on “dates,” silently feeling each other out to decide whether or not the person they’re paired up with is hot or not.
Look. I know this is stupid. You know this is stupid. All the show has to do to get us on its side is turn to us with a wink and say, “We know this is stupid, folks, but let’s see how much mileage we can get out of it anyway.” At every time you think it’s going to do something like that, though, it falls back on that humorlessness, the thought that all of this is very serious business. This makes the show oddly compelling at times. The final moments when all of the participants find out what everyone they’ve met really looks like are about as queasily fascinating as you’d expect them to be, but, then, the last part of The Dating Game, when the contestant chose the one of the three she or he most wanted to go out with, had that same kick, and that show knew it wasn’t the brightest.
There’s an added problem here. In an effort to speed things along, I guess, the producers have examined the personalities and dating histories of all six contestants (three male, three female) and paired them off based on who should be most compatible for whom. In the pilot, the fact that everyone pairs off with the person they’ve been told to pair off with seems to honestly baffle Morreale, but the show never seems to consider that this is exactly what happens when you predispose a bunch of people to think that a certain outcome is going to be most advantageous for them. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Morreale to say, “Actually, we totally lied to you guys about that. Here’s who you ACTUALLY should be with,” but that moment never came. I can’t decide if this series is actually misguided enough to think it’s helping people find true love or if it’s deeply cynical about the whole process and just is too shy to show us that. Probably both.
The three guys lined up for the pilot include Stephen and Seth, two fairly reliable nerd archetypes (Stephen does SAT tutoring, while Seth sets up audio-visual systems), and Allister, a charming British DJ who seems to have deep-seated psychological issues that he’s attempting to exorcise by going on a crappy dating show. One wonders whether or not ABC and Endemol should be putting a few extra steps in the contestant screening process, but then the pilot wraps its “storyline,” as it were, around the guy, pairing him, the most attractive of the guys, up with Melanie, a cute but not exceptionally gorgeous Fiona Apple type with a too big but very sweet smile. (Did I just convince half the comments section to check this out? I think I did!)
The connection the two form in the dark room is actually sorta poignant until you think about the fact that Melanie is desperately lonely, and Allister just has no clue how to deal with the emotionally scarring traumas of his childhood (when he psychs himself up for his date with Melanie by telling himself to not expose too much of his horrifying stories, you know you’re in for SOMEthing, at least) and you realize the show is basically exploiting both of these things, trying to get you to take that sucker’s bet at the end of the episode as you wonder whether that connection will be strong enough, whether Allister will come out that door and take Melanie’s hand or realize he’s way better looking than her.
The other girls are basically shallow, hot girl stereotypes, so, naturally, they get paired up with the nerds. Australian Leni is vaguely interesting by dint of her accent and by somehow so flustering Stephen that he turns a question about how he feels about marriage and children into a long, rambling answer about good sex. Also, when she dictates what she thinks he looks like to a sketch artist, she describes someone who looks so much like a superhero that the contestants actually comment on it. Christina, on the other hand, is your stereotypical reality show hot girl who says she’s looking for more but absolutely in no way, shape or form actually is. Her pairing with Seth results in a lot of heavy petting in the dark room, but where will it lead when the lights come up?
For a while, I kinda worried I was spoiling way too much with this review, until I rewatched the pilot and realized that every plot point outlined above is breathlessly hyped in the “UP NEXT!” segments before commercial and a few of the twists are telegraphed from the earliest possible moment (turning up in the explanatory, “here’s what this show is” montage that all reality shows must have, apparently because someone passed a law dictating such). And, hey, we don’t watch this sort of show to be surprised. There’s been a lot of talk about why reality shows have replaced the sitcom, and I think that both genres rely on a certain level of predictability to draw us in – we know how Archie Bunker is going to react at seeing Sammy Davis, Jr., at his door, just as we know, deep in our hearts, how all three of these couples are going to end up (because if you can’t figure out reality show editing rhythms by now, there’s no hope for you, I’m afraid). There’s nothing wrong with this predictability, since the anticipation of predicting how something will turn out can be almost as conducive to giddiness as actually seeing it pan out that way.
But real love is unpredictable, a messy, complicated pile of bleeding, broken hearts and tentative connections formed over the barest scrapings of fingers against each other. It’s about finding new ways to be kind to each other or new ways to utterly destroy each other. It’s the very baseline of human existence, the longing to have someone there at our side, lest we die without them. For a moment, Dating in the Dark starts to feel like it might have a grasp on that, as it twists and turns us to make us wonder if Allister and Melanie’s love was real or a blind illusion. But the second that becomes too real, too potentially torturous, the show falls back on its editing tricks, on making us think that none of this need be messy. “It’s all just a game, isn’t it?” the show seems to say, and no matter how much Morreale pretends that the series is finding true love, it reveals its deeply cynical heart here. This, more than almost any other dating reality show, is a messy, human, raw connection ground down into something that goes down easy. The sad thing is that Dating in the Dark is so cynical about all of this that it assumes you will be too.
Grade: C+
Stray observations:
- But, OK, I was really upset that the ABC Web site wasn’t updated to let me know how the couples were getting along after the show yet (which, of course it wasn’t, since the show hasn’t aired for anyone yet). So something about this got its hooks in me, I guess.
- Also, this episode concludes with one of the guys hiding in some bushes, hoping to surprise his ladylove. And he wonders why he has to go on TV?