Everything old is new again, and fan-favorite shows from the 1990s and beyond have been lining up to be brought back in new forms. One of the most iconic series in reality TV history, Blind Date, is just the latest one on the pile. Dating shows were nothing new in 1999 when the show first hit the airwaves, but the series took a cheeky attitude and pop-up interjections to make something truly special before its cancellation in 2006. The bad dates were often better than the good ones, and some daters became pre-viral legends. Today sees Blind Date come back to the airwaves on Bravo with Nikki Glaser as a host. Normally we’d write a listicle about the show, but we have something different today, because dig this: I was a dater on Blind Date.
How To Succeed In Reality TV
Living in either New York or Los Angeles, opportunities to be on television are hard to avoid. At the time, I was in New York working at a software company and had very few actual responsibilities, so I would trawl Craigslist’s “gigs” section – free postings for non-full-time money-making opportunities – to supplement my income. If you want to be on a game show, that was often the place to look, and I auditioned for $64,000 Pyramid and many others without success, nearly made it on the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and, a few years later, won $1000 on Cash Cab.
Many of these ads try to mask what you’re auditioning for – some of them are for shows that haven’t aired or even been picked up by a network, so they don’t want to show their concept to the whole world. Others, though, are very open about what you’ll be doing.
One afternoon, I noticed an ad for people looking to appear on a dating show. I was single at the time and, upon further investigation, found that it was for Blind Date, already a favorite guilty pleasure of mine. Auditions were on my birthday, so I took off from work early and went into Midtown to give it a shot.
The Audition
Sure, my mother thinks I’m very handsome but I certainly did not have the chiseled chin and multiple symmetrical abs of a typical male contestant on Blind Date. I knew that I would have to grab their attention in other ways. When I showed up to the nondescript rented office building that the screeners were working out of, they gave me a nine-page questionnaire to fill out that delved deep into just about every possible aspect of my personality, dating life, and sexual history.
I used that form to the fullest, telling every wild story of drunken idiocy that I could come up with. I knew from watching that the show thrived when big personalities with minimal filters went on dates, so that’s the way I presented myself. I contrasted my unassuming physicality with a wild, reckless nature that got me into frequent trouble.
Once that was done, they took me into a back room in front of a camera setup and a producer grilled me. This is where they got the introductory footage that they would use on a show to give viewers a quick preview of what kind of person they were dealing with, as well as ensure that we could perform on camera. After a few minutes, they called in the top-level producer for the shoot to sit in, and she obviously liked what she saw because they kept me talking for some time, asking me to repeat certain things with very specific phrasing. By this point I already had a pretty clear idea that I was on the list.
As I left, the producer told me that it was very likely that I’d make the show. She was right – they called me a few days later to schedule a shoot.
The Formula
Each episode of Blind Date consists of two dates, running around 7-8 minutes each. To get that footage, the crew keeps you out for eight straight hours. There’s a reason they tell you to bring three different shirts!
There’s a formula for the date: they do the first meet, then you travel to a series of activities designed to bering you into closer contact with each other, followed by a meal and drinks and then a closer segment. They’re ruthlessly efficient about this flow, having everything timed down to the minute.
Obviously, you’re surrounded by a camera crew that captures your every move from multiple angles, but what you might not know is that the show’s producers are always lurking just outside of frame to make sure that you keep things moving and don’t stray too far off the concept. Before you start, they sit you down and give you a no-go list, which was one of the most fascinating parts of the process for me.
On a normal date, you flesh out your knowledge of the other person in a bunch of different ways – asking about their job, their upbringing, their family, stuff like that. One very common way to connect with somebody is through media – what music do you like, what’s your favorite movie, do you watch anime subbed or dubbed? But on the set of Blind Date, that is absolutely forbidden. Because the show aired in syndication in the primitive pre-streaming days, they didn’t want it to be connected to any specific point in time so it wouldn’t feel dated. Talking about TV, music, books, politics, even museum shows was taken off the table permanently.
In addition, the gaggle of producers taking it all in would throw you prompts from their couch when they wanted to push the conversation to new areas and levels of emotional intensity.
Finally, you and your date were strongly discouraged from speaking to each other at all when the camera wasn’t rolling, leading to awkward moments of silence as you waited for the crew to set up the next shot.
The true secret ingredient in reality television, though, is alcohol. The vast majority of these shows simply will not cast you if you do not drink, because they know that booze lubricates people into being more open and expressive with their emotions. Shows like Blind Date and The Bachelor are essentially dependent on their contestants getting tanked every day. According to a piece on Insider, producers on the Bachelor franchise will even refill drinks without contestants’ knowledge in order to get them loose and dramatic.
It’s easy to think about reality TV as just turning the cameras on and hoping something good comes out of it, but in reality the producers are writing stories from the minute they see you, and then working to get the footage that will enable them to best tell that story. So let’s examine how they got us there.
Love Connection
I didn’t have a lot of immediate vibing with the woman they picked to be my date. Her name was Heather, she was nice enough, but there wasn’t any real love connection going on. But I’d been on plenty of dates with that exact same feeling from one or both sides, so I rolled with it. She worked at a magazine, lived in Chelsea, was wiry in that New York way but had moved to the city from somewhere else, in that New York way.
We met on a corner near her apartment – they set it up so a crew follows one dater to capture the first impression – and then were whisked away to the initial activity, a deeply embarrassing “DJ school” where an uninterested instructor taught us how to juggle beats on the 1s and 2s – or at least as much of that as you can accomplish in an hour. We followed that up with a 60 minute Krav Maga class. The Israeli martial art was undergoing a little boost in popularity, and it presented an irresistible opportunity to the producers to have Heather kick me in the groin on camera numerous times.
After that, we moved on to the dinner and drinks portion of the show, where the alcohol began to flow. Nobody had to tell me twice to order any expensive beer I wanted at dinner, but I made sure to chug lots of water so I didn’t get too sloppy. I knew that everything was leading towards a moment that the producers wanted to be the big shock of the date: the revelation that I did some naked video modeling as a young man for… a certain audience. This was the “pivot point” that the whole date narrative was moving toward – me saying it on camera and getting Heather’s reaction.
This is common practice for Blind Date – using the dinner segment to spring a big surprise on one of the daters. One of my favorite examples was an episode where the girl confessed she was into cock and ball torture over dinner to her terrified paramour. Heather, to her credit, took everything very well, asked a few questions and even gave me a smooch at the end of the night.
The producers were in a good mood because our date was the final one of the New York shoot, and they were looking forward to wrapping up and getting on with their lives. Apparently filming Blind Date was incredibly high-pressure and stressful, which doesn’t surprise me – trying to get usable footage out of a constantly-changing cast of drunks, egomaniacs and horny weirdos would grind me down real quick.
We went out for drinks with the whole crew, cameras off, afterwards. It was kind of strange to be socializing with the same people who were just pulling my strings on a “date” a few hours before, but it also felt pretty natural. We were, in a way, co-workers on this television product. I could have gone off the rails and ruined everything at any moment, but I felt like they were depending on me to give them good television. I certainly wasn’t there to find a new romantic partner, and everybody involved was completely fine with that.
Getting Paid
Because it’s not legal to keep somebody in front of a camera for eight hours and not pay them, Blind Date would cut you a check of $100 for your time in addition to all the free food and booze. That’s in exchange for the rights to exploit your image in perpetuity, including if you wound up on one of the show’s many compilation DVDs of hot tub mishaps and the like.
The episode aired many months later. By then I’d already started dating the woman who would become my wife, and I never spoke to Heather again. Sadly, the production company behind the original show hasn’t made any streaming deals, so we can’t link you to a place to watch it. And, in a lot of ways, that’s better for everybody. We’ve got a new generation of Blind Date to enjoy, and hopefully they’ll have just as interesting a time as I did.
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