Singled Out was a late-'90s MTV show through and through. It wasn't an MTV show (although it was memorably featured on an episode of The Real World), but its successor on the dating-show timeline was.
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Studs was a dating show with attitude, like much of TV at the time. This autopsy-of-a-date concept continued on into the early 1990s with Studs, which sent its contestants out on multiple dates before the show and then, Newlywed Game style, asked them questions to see whose answers matched up best. More than anything, Love Connection felt like the traditional dating show was being brought into the talk-show era of the 1980s, with a visual style more akin to the daytime talk shows and magazine shows of its era than those earlier Chuck Barris productions. The show itself recapped the date and determined whether or not a "love connection" was made, which would lead to further dates. On Love Connection, the matchmaking happened before the show - as did the first date. In the '80s, the dating-show gauntlet was picked up by Love Connection, the Chuck Woolery-hosted show that played like The Dating Game in reverse. That was certainly true of Barris's next show, The Newlywed Game, which technically wasn't a dating show (the dating came before the wedding) but operated on the same general premise: what do these people's answers to dumb little double-entendre questions say about their prospects for staying together forever? More than simply entertaining their audiences, shows like The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game burrowed themselves into the cultural lexicon - see the way Celebrity Dating Game gleefully replicates the original set for kitsch appeal or any time people joke about "making whoopee." The concept of the show was ostensibly about compatibility, even if the basis for that compatibility was flimsy and silly.Ĭompatibility - or at least the pretense of compatibility - has been at the heart of nearly every show that's followed in The Dating Game's wake. In those early days, the very concept of The Dating Game was enough to carry it as a TV novelty. Left to judge these bachelors by their answers to silly questions, the woman then chose which of the bachelors she'd like to date. The show would feature a single woman separated from three single men by a panel so she couldn't see them. But in 1965, TV producer Chuck Barris asked "What about real people?" And so The Dating Game was born. In the 1960s, if you wanted to see dating on TV, you were basically confined to Patty Duke's teenage crushes and The Courtship of Eddie's Father. But while The Celebrity Dating Game is largely a throwback to the original Dating Game, a look at the many shows that have aired in between says a lot about how TV and our cultural tastes and standards have changed over the last five-plus decades. It is, in short, the latest in a very long line of televised dating shows.
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This time around the series is hosted by the New Girl herself, Zooey Deschanel, with an assist from Michael Bolton, who contributes to the televised romance of it all by performing parody songs designed to provide the three contestants with hints about the (unknown to them) celebrity they're competing to date. A celebrity-themed twist on the original Dating Game of the 1960s and '70s, the new show invites a celebrity to choose between three eligible (and unseen by them) singles, based soley on their answers to a series producer-written, innuendo-laden questions. ABC is bringing back one of the most venerable titles in game-show history tonight with the premiere of Celebrity Dating Game.