Blind Date

When the creators of Blind Date hatched their ingenious idea and convinced Universal they could produce it as a twice a night strip, that was the first victory. The second one was combining it with written comedy. Introducing a pure reality date with no pop-ups would have grown weary by the end of the 1st season, but, right from the first day of shooting the pilot, surely the producers discussed their vision and agreed they needed to give the public a double dose of fun. I never miss an episode this show sucks you in and never lets you go.

The premise is simple: the applicants create a video description of themselves, and the Blind Date team hooks them up. They choose from a list of "activities", then drive a special camera equipped vehicle to their date. After the activity is dinner, then a camera equipped cab ride to a bar, then a cab ride home.

The entire time, we are watching the couple interact. In post-production, they add in thought balloons and clever comments. When I first watched this show, I thought it looked stupid, but a girlfriend convinced me to watch. Now I'm hooked!

The best part of "Blind Date"? I'm not sure there is one. Sometimes you know they hooked up incompatible people, but in general I think they choose couples that look good on paper.

The very few of these dates that work, work well. You can visibly see the connection as it's made. But the majority don't work.

And why don't they work? Many reasons. Is it really true that most guys are so incredibly "on the make"? Some of these guys are absolutely pathetic in their attempts to get their "prize". Laughable.

And some of these women are shallower than a rain puddle. Several times I've seen some really nice, sincere guy getting totally sneered at by his "date" because he isn't wealthy or "attractive" enough.

I would say that this series says more about PEOPLE than any other "reality show". Instead of fake and contrived situations, this is just a low budget documentation of things that people DO in real life.

Seriously, there is no other "reality" program than can even come close to real life as Blind Date does. It's worth watching, it's even worth watching repeats to get details and nuances you may have missed the first time.

A simple premise: a man and a woman talk to a camera and state the kind of partner they are looking for and add their likes, dislikes in and out of bed. Then they meet, and either have the best date of their lives and even open the door for a second date (which often ends up in some heavy action), or have some of the most dysfunctional, hilariously bad dates that the camera has ever seen, and those predictably end up inches away from a fist-fight... or in one audacious scene, the woman literally leaping from her date (which was on a boat) and swimming to shore, effectively calling it a day. While it is occasionally nice to see a date that doesn't go outrageously bad, it pays to see people make fools of themselves by putting themselves in the most embarrassing of situations while carrying out their quasi-date, and hearing Roger Lodge's wry observations at the beginning or end of these skits, and of course, the stars of the show are the often spot-on bubbles that "describe" what the daters might actually be thinking, especially in scenes of escalating awkwardness.

Apparently the premise of this show is to illustrate how smug, egocentric, self-centered, and materialistic 20-somethings are. If that's the case, it succeeds beyond its wildest dreams. Planned Parenthood should use episodes from this show as training films; the moral would be, "If you have kids, they might turn out like this!" The men--for lack of a better word--are invariably totally obsessed with their bodies; many of them take their "dates" to a workout at their gym. They then spend most of the date strutting, preening and bragging about their sexual prowess, and can't understand it when the women don't laugh at, or even get offended by, their smarmy, juvenile attempts at double entendre. The women don't come across much better, either. They're either simpering bimbos or arrogant, balls-to-the-wall barracudas determined to show the guy who's boss and take control of everything from the get-go. If this is an example of the generation that's going to take over from us, then we're in worse shape than I thought.

The best thing about this show are the "thought bubbles" and cartoon drawings that supposedly tell what the couples are really thinking. Those are very funny. I have to wonder though--where do they find some of those people? From what they say in the little intro before the cameras start following them on their dates, I get the impression that most of the participants are 1) sex obsessed, 2) have huge egos, 3) very immature, 4) lacking social skills, 5) crazy. Do they even want lasting relationships?