Zooey Deschanel to host Celebrity Dating Game with song parody writer Michael Bolton

Zooey Deschanel and Michael Bolton are teaming up for a new version of The Dating Game for ABC, but in keeping with the wacky unpredictably of modern life, this one’s going to have some twists. First, it’ll be called The Celebrity Dating Game, meaning celebrities will be involved in the dating, and also Michael Bolton will be… singing “special” parody songs for some reason. This comes from Deadline, which doesn’t really explain what’s going on or why it’s happening, but one likely possibility is that ABC asked Bolton to co-host a new version of The Dating Game, and he—ever the jokester, given “Jack Sparrow” and his Big Sexy Sexy Valentine’s Day Special on Netflix—came back with the idea that he should do parody songs every episode. Then, assuming he was joking or that he’d give up and just be a normal co-host, ABC agreed. Next thing you know, ABC is doing The Celebrity Dating Game with Zooey Deschanel hosting and Michael Bolton doing parody songs.

Anyway, the basic structure of The Dating Game is that one single person asks questions and poses hypothetical scenarios to an unseen panel of other single people, but it’s unclear how many of the people involved in this new version will be celebrities. Will it be a regular person asking a panel of unseen celebrities? A celebrity posing hypothetical date scenarios to unseen regular people? Celebrities talking to celebrities? That would be ridiculous, but celebrities do tend to date celebrities, so it would make sense not to waste their time by making them talk to—ugh—normals.

Deadline doesn’t say when the eight-episode series will premiere, but it does seem like the kind of thing that would be relatively easy to do during COVID-times.