HIt was a new drinking game. Stay in any television program that dates back to the last five years, and take a chance every time any of the following options occur: A contestant regrets the dating panorama online Savage, a host promotes the benefits of “quotes without distractions” and the soft -style house of Ibiza is reproduced on panoramic shots of a tropical destination. Well, you will be as drunk as a 2015 Love Island contestant when you finish Stranded on the island of honeymoon, The last attempt of the BBC to boost the reality market market, where six couples must survive on a beach in the Philippines without electricity, technology or a toilet in operation for three weeks. The question is: can you find love and prosper in such a eliminated environment of modern society?
Organized by Davina McCall, Honeymoon It is the Odball Lovechild of Married to first sight Australia and the United States reality series Survivor (and Love Island It is the Demacrada Live Aunt). As a fan of the quotes of reality that feels tired of the Beast of Cliquey, which is the Netflix Dating-Verse, which appears in another same program every few months, I had excited me what seemed like a new refreshing concept of the BBC. Oh, how wrong he had been. Honeymoon It is completely predictable, and it is just a testimony of the unimaginative, repetitive and cooked parameters that continue to affect the dates.
In Honeymoon island, Each couple has a not legally binding wedding ceremony, where hypothetical votes and first piss are exchanged. Until now, then Mafs. After the couples swim on the ground, fully dressed, to the cabin next to the beach, they will call home during the next 21 days, they are thrown to Couples Cove (Ahem, Love IslandHouse love, someone?), Where relationships and temptations are proven when they meet another twenty horny. And then there are the phrases used, such as “without distraction of the outside world” and “find love against probabilities”, which remind me of the gigantic “social experiment” of Netflix ” Love is blindwhere single date from a wall without contact with their friends or families. (In fact, when it comes to seeing this program, detecting concepts inspired by other quotes series could be another completely drinking game).
I'm not saying that Honeymoon It is the only series that takes signs of its predecessors. The similarities between all these creations is probably a sign of the state of the television industry in general, where it is safer for broadcasters and streamers to replicate a commercially infallible format. Just look how the success of the BBC's deception game game The traitors has led to a floodwill of aspiring series, from Channel 4 The inheritance To BBC One Destination x.
Radiodifusion agencies can also guarantee the format of the “without distraction” dating program: the narration that the contestants are so disappointed by the superficial state of the modern quotes that will happily escape their real life to find love, because it becomes a particular cultural mood. It is no secret that the dating scene in 2025 has a bad reputation, thanks to social networks and appointment applications that have infinite potential partners on a dish. Meeting new people has never been easier, but forging a real connection has never been more infernal. It is not surprising that Honeymoon The contestants will gladly be stripped of their devices and vices to embark on a love story that does not imply the words “hinge” or “slid in my instagram dms” in their count.
The rhetoric surrounding these shows also suggests that contestants want to escape the quotations at the surface level. In HoneymoonThe 30-year recruitment consultant, MAE, tells the camera that he worries to live without his skin care routine, his “anti-juerga straw” and the directed facial mask, but you also have the feeling that he wants someone to fall in love with her more natural. In the second season of Love is blind from the United KingdomLast month launched, the contestants were unanimous that they wanted to stop being tried for their appearance, or judge others by their own, and prioritized issues such as family, religion and lifestyle in their talk. Essentially, the idea is that these shows will succeed presenting an alternative to an endless sliding life. However, the irony is that by repeatedly pursuing this concept, each show has fallen into the trap of being as repetitive and boring as the applications that try to help us escape.
And surely there are more original ways to present a different version of the appointments. Take the brilliant My mom, your dadalso organized by McCall, in ITV1. When he arrived in 2023, I licked it: it was the most encouraging dating show he had seen in years, following a group of single parents (many of them actually normal!) Looking for love while their adult children observe from a surveillance bunker. It was cheerful, moving and enlightening. These were people who sailed through the knuckle, adult, complicated life, not the question of whether they could survive without their straw against straw.
What would really restore some very necessary hope in the modern dating landscape is more shows such as My mom, your dadInstead “Mafs, But do it tropical. ”
Until then, when it comes to my own relationship with the quotes programs of reality, I think it's time for us to go at a break.
