For a long time, the romantic comedy films and TV shows of the past served as Cupid’s true north where we all took our dating cues. These days, rom-coms have fallen off from where they once were. In fact, they aren’t even a designated category on Netflix.
Take a step back and you’ll see that the millennial generation has now gone through three iterations of dating media. First, there was the tail end of the rom-com era with films like “How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days” and “Hitch.” Then our watercooler talk shifted to reality shows like “The Bachelor,” “Love Island,” and “Love is Blind.”
But now internet creators are spearheading dating content across video clips on TikTok and Instagram reels, podcasts, and online dating shows that are even more participatory, viral, and bingeable than ever. Now many of the intermediaries like moderators and Chris Harrison are gone and there is no dating topic too taboo. For example, take YouTube channel Jubilee (8.45 million subscribers) and associated Jubilee Media, which has soared since its 2017 founding behind videos that depict the swipe-happy no guardrails nature of dating today like “6 Tall Queens vs 1 Secret Short Girl,” or ” “Blind Dating 5 Girls Based On Their Outfits.”
Jubilee’s most popular video “30 vs 1: Dating App in Real Life” (with more than 29 million views) involves a clearly conflicted guy swiping right and left on potential dates complete with swipe audio cues from your favorite dating app. “I’m positive he was swiping based on if they were smiling or not,” one top comment levies, more interested in claiming to know the alchemy that goes into attraction and dating in 2023.
It’s more clear than ever that we’re looking to the internet to give us clues and cues on how to date. But why are people responding so strongly to dating content online these days? What opportunities exist in the realm of the internet that didn’t in the format, say, of a rom-com or a reality tv production? And most importantly, what do the creators of some of these shows have to say about more and more people getting dating cues from the internet in 2023?
Truly Blind Dating
Brandon Berman and Harrison Forman are the co-hosts and creators of UpDating, whose viral show with two (or often much more) blindfolded dating contestants, has taken YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok by storm post-pandemic. The show is actually a live dating stand up comedy mashup shot in cities around the country. It aims to be the “most raw dating show in existence.” But most people consume the show online, with UpDating’s YouTube channel nearly at the 600,000 mark and its TikTok at well over 1 million followers.
In one recent clip, two contestants happened to be on three separate UpDating episodes,