If you’ve made your way to YouTube in the last year or so, you might be familiar with the phenomena that is the website’s own dating shows. Whether through the videos themselves, a reaction to it by someone like Cody Ko or Jarvis Johnson or even a repost of an episode on TikTok, they’ve been making the rounds on the internet. The consensus seems to be that they are wildly entertaining, spark conversation and make for great videos to watch while you eat.
What makes these dating shows so fun in particular? Compared to other dating shows that air on streaming platforms like Netflix or on TV, the lower-budget, more ambitious YouTube shows don’t initially seem like they’d match up. After all, how could “The Bachelor” or “Love Island” even be considered to be in the same ballpark as Cut’s “The Button” or Jubilee’s “Versus 1”?
The Relatability of Normalcy
In a way, the charm of these shows lies in how normal they are. They’re grounded in reality, with the people starring in the episodes just being … people. They’re the ones you see walking down the street on a regular day, people you bump into at a coffee shop, someone you go to class with, your coworker, your best friend or even you.
The “dating” aspect of it doesn’t take place in a giant mansion or on a lavish island. Instead, it’s just people in a room getting to know each other. The shows bring important topics to light, and even though the videos are ten minutes long at best, they’re able to feel incredibly real and raw, with surprisingly tender moments. A particular one, from Cut’s “In the Dark” series, is a prime example. In the video, the two women reveal their feelings for one another in a dark room, in a space where they have nothing but their voices and feelings to rely on.
The video perfectly encapsulates the anxiety, excitement and adrenaline that might come from confronting a crush. As a result, it ends up making for relatable and entertaining content.
Romance for Everyone
Oftentimes, long-running, big-budget and somewhat “traditional” television dating shows tend to shy away from diversifying their participants. If there’s a set formula that works, they stick to it. Audiences, however, seem to be looking for more than what’s tried and true. They’re looking for a reflection of society itself and everyone that comes with it. More recently, Netflix’s new reality dating show, “Perfect Match” has been met with backlash for eliminating most of its contestants that are women of color in just the first few episodes.
These shows also seem to stick to heteronormative standards of what love itself is, with some shows having deemed queer couples on dating shows “logistical nightmares.”
Meanwhile, YouTube dating shows seem to be pulling out of a pool of everyday people. They’re representative of the masses, and these shows are not afraid of doing so. Several of their episodes are dedicated solely to showcasing relationships between people of color and queer folk and these videos bring to the table the conversations that need to be had.
It is Entertainment, After All
Still, despite all of this, these shows might not be entirely different from the rest. They were created to entertain, to garner views and to be … reality dating shows, despite all their differences with the genre. Are these shows being made to bring people together or to piss viewers off? A lot of the contestants on these shows are just plain unlikeable. Whether they have strong preferences, are prejudiced or just straight-up annoying, they’re there for a reason. They get people talking and entertain them. Hate-watching is still watching.
However, when does this go too far? Are some of these people even deserving of a platform like these dating shows? One of the newer episodes of “The Button” showed one of the contestants reaching over and going in for a kiss without the other’s consent — which he eventually did manage, on the cheek. The show, however, allowed him to stay on for the next few rounds despite him having made the next few women visibly uncomfortable as well.
Is this entertainment taken a little too far?
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