Review – Dating In The Dark

Dating In The Dark – ABC – 10:00/9:00pm Monday – USA

Dating In The Dark is one half thought out idea stretched to forty minutes. While it fails to deliver anything passing as entertainment it does deliver everything it says on the tin: ‘dating in the dark’. Each episode three women and three men move into a house and over the course of what feels like an extended afternoon they date each other – IN THE DARK. It has to be depressing for fans of the human race to note that Dating In The Dark is currently enjoying its second season on ABC.

Just as with Big Brother the Dutch can be held responsible for this shemozzle of a reality show. It would seem that the major side effect of legalizing marijuana is that you come up with some incredibly inane reality television. The pitch is simple enough “is love truly blind?” and if people got to know each other in a pitch black room would they still like each other once they saw their prospective partner face to face. Presumably after somebody suggested ‘wouldn’t it be funny if we watched people go on dates… in the dark?’ that everybody was too busy laughing to spend time thinking of what the show should do with the other 35 minutes.

The first episode of the second season invited three reasonably okay looking women and three sort of alright looking gents into the house all the while pumping up the ‘but what will happen when they see each other?’ Presumably they’ll shrug and go ‘yeah, they’re pretty normal looking’. The cast isn’t exactly pimped out with overweight people with horns or anything, they’re all just average people looking for their big break in Hollywood and hoping that their stint on Dating In The Dark will be their ticket to their dream career of being a singer or comedian or tool who appears on reality shows.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the sorts of people applying to be on Dating In The Dark are douchebags and morons. It should also come as no surprise that watching douchebags and morons look for love via infrared camera is about as exciting as watching anything via infrared camera – it’s not, at all. It turns out that if you fill your show with ugly black & white footage of dead eyed people groping around while having inane conversations that’s exactly what you’ll get. Once you’ve attached your program to such a dud central premise there is nothing you can do to get away from it.

Dating In The Dark starts off by letting all six contestants into the dark room together so they can choose who they want to go on a date with. Then the couples all go on a date. AND THEN: they go on another date. AND THEN: they go on another date. BUT AFTER THAT: they go on ANOTHER date. Then they choose who they’d like to see in the light, and then they choose whether they want to go on another date BUT NOT IN THE DARK THIS TIME. And then that’s it – see you all again next week when six new people date in the dark.

The show boils down to three couples that each go on four dates while we get to watch in grainy black and white. That’s it. That’s the show. It’s creepy watching these people, no matter how moronic they are, fumble about trying to figure out what to do with the lights off which isn’t ‘screw on national television’. It’s a weird and stupid premise, but all that would be forgivable if it was even mindlessly entertaining. Dating In The Dark’s biggest sin is taking a ridiculously stupid premise and making it ridiculously boring. If you’re going to be the dumbass show where people go on dates in the dark at least try and make it fun.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Ugly