I meant to write this last week following the chaos of the not-actually-live Love is Blind reunion and then work blew up on me. So, this is much less topical than it was supposed to be and I apologize.
Since the height of Covid, I’ve watched a lot of dating shows. Both Mary and I have some personal connections to the Bachelor franchise (I went to preschool with Ben Higgins, Mary played volleyball with Katie Thurston), but we were never really interested until the pandemic hit. I’m not sure why we became more interested then, but a weekly gathering among friends to watch the dating show de jour has become a fixture of our lives the last few years, similar to sporting events.
And I think that’s how most folks consume this content; it’s analogous to sports. I’m sure there are some people who are very invested in the “mission” of these shows, but most folks watch to see the drama and assess who “wins.”. And the sports feature that needs to jump over here most is the concept of the challenge flag; I firmly believe that this will invigorate a concept that’s gone stale across the board.
The Stale Format
The Bachelor franchise is the once and future king of the genre, sot that’s where I’ll spend most of my time. One lead picks their favorites amongst a large cast that is winnowed down each week, with early weeks focused on establishing an initial relationship and inevitably devolving into intra-cast drama as the main driver of intrigue. That drama leads up to one-or-multiple in-person “live” reunions where the cast have seen show footage for the first time, which often stokes more flames.
Newer entrants to the genre have attempted to tweak this format, and while the structure of the “game” in (the amazing, sadly canceled) FBoy Island or Love is Blind doesn’t look much like The Bachelor, they suffer from the same malaise. Most of the drama on the show is driven by he-said-she-said arguments that aren’t resolved until the show airs.
That resolution has driven the live events and reunions at the finale to be among the most-watched episodes, but saving all of the drama for a single event has grown tiresome. When everything is on film, why are we settling for these arguments to be resolved the same way they are in the real world?
The Challenge Flag Solution
My idea is simple: every cast member on a show will be able to challenge the truth of any statement made by any other cast member exactly once. That challenge will result in them seeing the raw footage of the event in question; they will not have to take anyone’s word for it nor wait for the show to hit the air a year later. The Challenge Flag brings forward the kind of drama traditionally reserved only for a finale and it adds a new explicitly-competitive element to the game that will hamper the primary method of gaining fame via dating show.
More Immediate Resolutions
It can be fun, as the audience, to know things that the characters on-screen do not. That’s how most drama builds! But, it’s tiresome to consistently have the only source of drama be that the audience knows how someone really acts/thinks/feels and have that information be completely unavailable to the other characters.
In a work of fiction, exactly when “reality” is revealed is an unknown; you expect it will be, but you don’t know when or how. Drama! But in dating-based reality tv, you know when it will be revealed; there’s no actual suspense here. That’s boring. With a Challenge Flag, any character could force a reveal at any time, and the game becomes much more interesting!
More Competition, Less Gaming
If any competitor could challenge them at any time, contestants would have to time your stories much more carefully, and overall you probably spend less time disparaging your castmates and focus more on the actual intent of the “game.”
But eventually, that might run out. Maybe everyone uses their challenges in the first few weeks and then at the end there’s no risk. While that puts us right where we are today, we’d be able to see how behaviors change with and without the challenge threat. That’s interesting!
But I do generally think that this large known-unknown would reduce the amount of effort contestants spend trying to get other contestants eliminated and instead refocus the drama where it’s supposed to be. I’m just tired of having the central drama always be revolving around something very easily solved by rolling the footage in a make believe world where there’s always footage to be rolled.
Does any of this actually matter? Of course not. But there’s so much money to be made in this medium and it’s increasingly upsetting to see it go so stale across the board. A new feature would go a long way to reviving a floundering genre of trash television.