A Dating Show Made for the Age of Apps

This was a great watch! Quick and interesting. I was taken by the dates and responses as well as the inclusivity. Thanks for the suggestion!

Kudos to the author for this nuanced review of a show I haven't yet seen but will have to check out based on this read. So much of life is filtered through cheap algorithms that it is hard to stand, as they are based on such limited notions of what it means to be alive. Of course, the show itself was likely greenlit by an algorithm at Netflix, which then recommends it to people choosing dates based on Tinder algorithms, wearing outfits recommended by Amazon. It makes being alive frictionless—but, still, I'll take friction.

I've watched this show, and I enjoyed the range of leads. After the initial episode of a bland, mid-20s white man, we got a divorced South Asian woman in her 30s, a gay man (I think he was East Asian, can't remember), a black lesbian woman, a white widowed man in his 60s or 70s, and a white hipster girl in her 20s. My favorite was watching the older people. People can be single - and looking for love - at any age! I also enjoyed how they cast dates of varying ethnicities for every lead. I also commend the show for showing difficult moments. Brief spoilers ahead: - a date ripping into the lead for being divorced. He was very antagonistic and a little unhinged. I've never see someone get that angry over someone else being divorced. He treated her like dirt on that date. It made me sad/angry for her, but that's also so real! Not every date is a good one. - the widower telling a horribly distasteful joke to one of his dates, and she flat out told him to never tell it again. - one of the dates the hipster girl went on made several crass sexual references before they even ordered. It was gross, and she left.

Why watch a show about dating when I’m living it? Oh, and its awfulness has no end. Between the catfishing, crazies, breadcrumbs, etc.... you sometimes meet someone and for a week or two it works. Then a real problem, characteristic or fact comes up and poof! ghosted! It is a never ending job interview where you are reduced to being an easily replaceable commodity. Autonomy and alienation have won.

It occurred to me, while reading Willa Cather's "A Wagner Matinee," that if you were twenty, in Nebraska, in 1804, you'd be lucky to find anyone to court and spark. Why would supply and demand not apply to humanity. World population when I was born approached two billion, and now we approach nine. Oversupply cheapens, value reduces.

The job of dating apps is to keep you single.

What would the writer of this article expect that would not be the same familiar conversations given that almost everything is the same. Same restaurant, same purpose for the date, presumably a similar match? It's natural and human for people in a dating situation to want to know all the basics about the person they are spending time with, in order to decide what direction they want to go after the date. The decision as to whether this is a viable show should depend on the viewers.

"Despite what tech companies would have us believe, people cannot be optimized for one another; an overwhelming abundance of options discourages the leaps of faith that can transform the terrible uncertainty of dating into something great." I haven't seen this show, and to be honest, I probably won't. But the subject is relevant in my current life, and the summary here rings true to me, given my relatively recent experiences as a late-in-life divorced man. Of course, the ever so slight difference between the daters highlighted here and me is that I'm a 60-something who is dealing with what seem to me to be the exact same dynamics of the online dating world - making initial contact, establishing a level of trust and interest, first dates, what comes next(?), commitment or not(?), and then what seems like the almost inevitable "moving on" after rejection or the inability to slake the thirst for someone just a bit "better" - you know, someone without flaw or onerous baggage. Hopefully, the producers will include people who are "looking for love" from all across the age spectrum. I'm willing to bet that the similarities will far outweigh the differences. So, perhaps the viewers who are in their 30s and 40s, and who have a lot of life left in them, might learn and see that the search for "perfect" is a never-ending fool's quest that essentially destroys the possibility of satisfaction with the perfectly "good."