How TV shows are finally becoming gay dating

An ultra-wholesome Japanese dating series on Netflix has won over viewers globally. It’s part of a wave of reality shows that show the nuances and differences of gay relationships.

It’s a concept we’ve seen many times before: a group of strangers walk into a house and, with cameras filming their every move, look for a romantic connection. But conceptually, Netflix’s The Boyfriend is actually a million miles away Island of Love the villa, where singles with chiseled abs look for love (and fame on Instagram).

The Netflix series is Japan’s first same-sex dating show — a landmark moment for LGBTQ+ representation. The premise is simple: in Tateyama, a quiet coastal town in Japan, a seaside house known as the “Green Room” becomes home to a group of nine young people from different backgrounds, from product designers to artists, models , students and chefs. As their stories unfold, a panel of commentators – including Japanese actress Megumi, pop star Thelma Aoyama and comedian Yoshimi Tokui – provide humorous analysis of every moment, misstep and micro-drama.

Words like “groundbreaking” are overused in TV criticism, but The Boyfriend really feels like it deserves it. Since the first episodes appeared on Netflix on July 9, the show has been positive reviewed and much discussed on social media by viewers around the world – mostly because of the fashion different it feels like the more over-the-top, conflict-ridden dating shows we’re used to seeing. In the green room, romances are formed from a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glance, a flirty picnic on the beach, or a letter posted under a bedroom door. And the show is part of a wider shift, where a new wave of LGBTQ+ dating shows – such as BBC Three’s I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl in the UK – are showing viewers a healthier side of reality the romantic.

TV critic and writer Scott Bryan, host of BBC 5 Live You have to watch podcast, believes The Boyfriend’s success is because it exists at the meeting point of broader TV trends. The first is that non-English TV shows have gradually become more popular on streaming platforms since the dystopian Korean drama. Squid game it became Netflix always the most watched show in 2021. “Sometimes watching a show with subtitles means you actually become more absorbed in it,” says Bryan. “Because you’re not scrolling on your phone or looking at another screen, you actually have to watch it.”

Then there’s the show’s production setup, with the panel of commentators providing a sense of narrative cohesion and witty distinction: this is an extension of the format of Married at First Sight UK and Australia, where ‘experts’ watch group events such as parties of dinner. “The fact that you have these personalities giving instant reactions, rather than transferring them to a separate program, is great. It makes the show easier to watch and also makes the raw footage of the participants feel more organic and authentic in comparison. “

There’s also a quietly more thoughtful quality to both the contestants and the show as a whole that makes it stand out. Beloved has a definite “back to basics” feel. The group is tasked with running a coffee truck together and managing how they spend the profits to cover their household budget. As the name suggests, the series is about finding romantic love, but over the course of 10 episodes, which were released two at a time throughout July, the group also formed deep friendships. Fans were won over by the brotherhood between the men (and even their taste in men’s clothing) almost as much as their unpredictable novels.

In 2023, BBC Three I kissed a boy, presented by Dannii Minogue, became the UK’s first gay dating show. (It was followed by I kissed a girl, with a group of queer women, in 2024.) Dan Harry, a contestant on I Kissed a Boy, was initially unsure when approached by a casting producer. “I was extremely cautious,” he says. “Because there were no reference points for it. There were no other gay dating shows for me to visualize what it was going to be like.” But that ended up being what convinced him to take part. “I realized it could turn out to be a TV landmark moment. I wanted to be a part of that.”

Watching The Boyfriend, and both I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl, what is noticeable is how direct the communication between the couples is. Fair conversations between the contestants about their backgrounds and emotional lives come to the fore much more quickly than on a show like Love Island, where the discussions for a long time seem to revolve mainly around superficial flirting or “grafting” . Rejections are often delivered more constructively, and generally these shows felt considerably kinder and less manipulative towards their subjects than mostly straight shows like Love Island, Love Is Blind, or Married at First Sight. “There’s a very big difference between Love Island and something like I Kissed a Boy,” Harry explains. “In I Kissed a Boy, you see our stories and our background, our upbringing and our deeper emotional feelings, whereas in Love Island almost everything is about what happens in the villa bubble.”

Most dating shows — especially those that brand themselves as “experimental” — trade off an element of fantasy. Despite the escapist I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl being set at a “masseria” (an Italian farmhouse), however, Harry believes that the appeal of these shows is actually based on their normality. “People were drawn to watching an extremely ordinary set of people having conversations that you would have with your colleagues over pre-drinks or in your group chat and seeing them on screen for the first time,” he says . “We were talking about anecdotal things that most gay men can relate to.”

Compared to scripted television, reality TV has been ahead of the curve when it comes to LGBTQ+ representation. In the UK, Brian Dowling won Big Brother in 2001 as an openly gay man in a landslide public vote. In 2004, it was followed by Nadia Almada, a trans woman who won the fifth series of Big Brother Britain, which was an equally seismic moment for LGBTQ+ representation. But when it comes to dating shows, reality TV has been left behind. In the 2000s, I grew up watching shows like Playing it Straight – a ridiculous show where a woman had to identify gay men pretending to be straight while looking for the love of a genuine straight man in order to win a prize. prize money. The 2004 Sky One dating show There’s Something About Miriam took this sensationalism to new extremes. Here, 21-year-old Mexican model Miriam Rivera’s trans identity was deliberately hidden from the men competing to date her. (After Rivera’s death in 2019, the making of the series was explored in the Wondery podcast series The harsh reality and Channel 4 documentary series Miriam: Death of a Reality Star.)

More recently, LGBTQ+ people have been either completely excluded from existing dating show formats or awkwardly introduced into them as a minority. Married at First Sight eventually began featuring the occasional same-sex couple in its UK, US and Australian versions, but these shows did not take the opportunity to explore the nuances and differences of gay relationships. By comparison, gay-only dating shows are able to delve into some of the ways queer relationships might work with their own challenges, norms, and expectations.

Bryan says there’s a “new confidence” that these shows can present LGBTQ+ life as different, but not worse, and that they “won’t stereotype or simplify” the queer experience. On I Kissed a Boy, we saw the contestants talk about everything from coming out to preparing for sex, body image and their differing views on gay culture. And on I Kissed a Girl, viewers learned about everything from women’s insecurities about using the word “lesbian” to a glossary of lesbian-specific dating terms like “golden retriever” and the ever-elusive “black cat.” Bryan believes these changes are largely due to more LGBTQ+ creatives holding leadership roles behind the camera, “so the overall product can show us that there’s no one-size-fits-all way to be queer.”

As The Boyfriend reaches her very tearful conclusion, some of the group leave the Green Room as a couple, while others leave without finding love, but with a greater sense of self-acceptance and faith. The last two episodes emphasize kindness. “Be gentle with yourself,” Alan Takahashi he tells his fellow competitor Give it to Nakaiwho finds himself at an agonizing crossroads with his on-again, off-again love interest Shun Nakanishi. “Kindness really does have magical powers.”

With The Boyfriend proving that a softer approach can still make for compelling reality TV, this is a message that all dating shows can probably learn from. And when it comes to television that reflects more sides of LGBTQ+ life, it looks like these gay dating shows are just the beginning. “Reality TV is now showing us that queer people are completely whole people with different thoughts, feelings and desires,” says Harry. “We’re not just there to make a joke or to be symbols. Now, we’re the main characters.”

The Lover is streaming on Netflix now