Dating Fame Games

The five men seated in a small Mid-Wilshire office shot sideways glances at one another. They didn’t talk as they sized up their rivals, and no one touched the complimentary lollipops and red vines on the conference table. At one end of the room, a TV played old “Blind Date” episodes.

Most of them had waited several hours for their turn, and Nate Taylor was getting antsy. His voice trembling a little, he asked that someone change the channel.

“I just don’t need the intimidation factor right now,” he said.

Wearing khaki shorts, khaki shirt, sandals and a Panama hat, the 31-year-old Taylor, like the others in the room, had come to audition to be a contestant on “Blind Date,” the half-hour daily show that turns dating miscues into punch lines.

“I really have nothing to lose but my dignity,” he said. “It’s almost self-destructive.”

Nearby, lifeguard Iman Alami exhibited less concern.

“I’m good-looking, outgoing and fun,” he said, in what could have been a pitch to the show’s recruiters. “I know they are going to try to make a fool of me, but it’s not going to happen.”

Still, mocking ordinary folk in their pursuit of romance is an established--and increasingly widespread--television genre, as producers reduce dating to a mix of comic fodder and blood sport.

Dating shows have always been a staple of television, including long-running franchises such as “The Dating Game” and “Love Connection”--studio-based programs that featured contestants talking to, and about, a potential match.

By contrast, the new generation of dating shows relies on wireless technology, lipstick-size cameras and other innovations that make it possible to take dating out of the studio, allowing viewers to voyeuristically ride along every step of the way.

This summer has added several new wrinkles to a dating-show roster already brimming with the syndicated “Blind Date,” “Fifth Wheel,” “Rendez-View” and “Elimidate,” Fox’s “Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska” and the now-defunct “Temptation Island,” as well as ABC’s surprise hit, “The Bachelor.”

The situations, however, invariably tilt toward the bizarre. NBC’s “Meet My Folks,” for example, has parents strap their daughter’s potential suitors to a lie detector, and ask such embarrassing questions as whether the lad got a friend drunk so he could have sex with the friend’s sister.

“EX-treme Dating,” meanwhile--being tested on a few local stations, including KCOP in L.A.--has two women feeding information to a third woman while she’s on a date with their ex-boyfriend. They watch the action on a monitor and talk to her through an earpiece she’s wearing.

The producers concede that participating isn’t for everyone.

“It’s one of those things you watch with the idea ‘I’m glad that’s not me.’ It is your worst nightmare,” said Burt Wheeler, one of the show’s executive producers, adding that people can’t help but identify with the situations, “even though 90% of the world wouldn’t do it.”

Fortunately, most of the willing 10% seems to live in Los Angeles, where there’s no shortage of attractive singles eager to be on TV.

With setups that virtually guarantee the humiliation of some contestants--”Blind Date” uses irreverent animated thought-balloons to lampoon them--these shows generally offer more train wrecks than love connections. And the producers hope, plenty of knowing laughs.

“We consider ‘Blind Date’ a comedy ... about interpersonal relationships,” said executive producer David Garfinkle. “We don’t want to be mean-spirited, but if someone’s being a jerk, then we can go ahead and bury them.”

For viewers such as Kristin Minter, a 36-year-old actress whose credits include the series “ER,” that’s part of the appeal. She and her friend Judy Dixon get together every Tuesday night for what Dixon calls their weekly “sporting event,” watching contestants being humbled on “Blind Date.”

“You’re rooting for people to fail,” said Minter, who extracted herself from the dating world after a series of disappointing encounters. “The dating scene stinks. Most of the guys I’ve dated couldn’t pay for dinner, except one, and he was a drug addict.”

For Minter and Dixon, it’s revenge by proxy.

“You wish you could do that: Smack the guy and tell him what a jerk he was,” Minter said. To Dixon, a 36-year-old independent film publicist, the show offers a “hyper-reality,” reminding her why she’s watching dates rather than going on them.

“When you’re dating, you’re so vulnerable,” she said. “You wish you could do those things they’re doing on the shows, tell him, ‘You’re a loser’ or ‘I’m going home now,’ ” she said, citing one favorite episode in which a female contestant abruptly left, taking her dinner home in a to-go box.

Shows like “EX-treme Dating” are geared toward a demographic coveted by advertisers: 18-to 34-year-old women. But the bloodletting appeals to men too.

David Serby, a 38-year-old freelance writer, says he has watched more than his share of “Blind Date,” “Meet My Folks” and “Rendez-View,” and harbors little compassion for those involved.

“It’s like watching Jerry Springer,” he said. “I don’t think they’re interested in getting a date, they are interested in their 15 minutes of fame.... They don’t want to pay their dues and do community theater. They don’t even have the talent to go on ‘Survivor.’ ”

In other words, contestants subjected to ridicule deserve what they get.

“I love to watch real people make [fools] of themselves,” he said. “It’s this society’s obsession with celebrity--people will do anything to get on TV.”

In a narcissistic age, dating shows represent the ultimate narcissist fantasy, said Armond Aserinsky, a Philadelphia clinical psychologist who added that seeing others punished for their swollen egos offers viewers a great deal of satisfaction.

“We hire Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary, put them on camera--they’re glad to be there--and we beat them up,” he said. “It’s like the Roman games. You’re stupid enough to get in the cage with the lion, you’re going to get eaten. What did you think would happen?”

Despite the unusual quirks and wrinkles dreamed up by TV producers, people somehow manage to suspend disbelief long enough to see themselves reflected in the shenanigans and even feel they’re learning from the heavily edited high jinks that ensue.

Aserinsky, who teaches study groups on film and TV for psychologists and psychiatrists, believe viewers identify with the contestants--the next-door neighbor--but are also revolted by the behavior they see on the shows.

“You identify with them for a while, but you part company when they get punished,” he said. “Here’s this guy who gets on TV for no good reason. He has no talents. The only thing that’s going to make that OK is that he’s reduced to a moron in front of you. He has to pay a price so that now I don’t have to envy him.”

At the “Blind Date” offices, the door to the audition room is decorated with a poster advertising the show: “Real Dates, Real Funny.”

Caroline Johnson questions contestants in front of a camera: dating philosophies, strategies, dating likes and dislikes. “We do want real people,” Johnson said. “Outgoing and energetic.”

Johnson knows the drill. She was a “Blind Date” contestant before being hired by the show. “It was fun--like being a star for the day,” she said of the experience.

Searching for their star for the day, freelance recruiters, paid on commission, scour the city for contestants, chatting up strangers to persuade them to audition. A white board in an adjoining office charts the locales: Monday in Venice. Valley bars on Tuesday. Thursdays on Sunset Boulevard. Weekends, Zuma Beach in Malibu.

Wannabe contestants also come, unprompted, to open casting calls, and many are armed with the head shots actors carry around with them.

“This is L.A.,” Johnson said with a shrug. “A lot of people are models, actors, singers, and that’s great.” But, she added, the number of people trying to get on the show to further an entertainment career has dropped off since the beginning. Few people associated with so-called reality TV have been able to parlay their 15 minutes into careers, although some, including “Survivor’s” Richard Hatch and Colleen Haskell, have prolonged their exposure by appearing on “Entertainment Tonight” and in the movie “The Animal,” respectively.

In an effort to “keep it real,” producers regularly recruit in several cities nationwide.

Still, if there is a common thread to these shows, it’s their compromised reality. All involve dating in a fabricated manner--while asking participants not to notice, somehow, the cameras designed to catch every idiotic line and awkward moment.

“We’re small, but we’re definitely not invisible,” said Grant Axton, who has coordinated 348 dates for “Blind Date” this season, the show’s fourth. “We’re trying to create ... the voyeuristic side of a date.”

On any given day, the crew consists of five people: a producer, camera operator, audio person, production assistant and grip.

As a coordinating producer, Axton keeps track of the different crews and helps scout locations--a job that, with the proliferation of dating shows, is becoming increasingly difficult. On occasion, he said, competing shows cross paths at local restaurants or bars where they are taping. “You would think L.A. is bigger than that, but it really isn’t,” he said.

Condensing four dates into one, they shoot about eight hours of the couple together, partly in an effort to make contestants relax and forget about the cameras.

Axton’s job includes finding activities for the couples--changing oil on a Harley-Davidson together, for example--to bring out their personalities. Getting them out of their shells, he concedes, is not that hard.

“The type of people who are comfortable in a situation like this

Of course, the typical American date is dinner and a movie, but that makes for boring TV.

“They’re all incredibly contrived,” said NBC Executive Vice President Jeff Gaspin, whose hard-to-fit-on-a-business card list of responsibilities includes oversight of “alternative” series, specials, movies and program strategy.

Nonetheless, dating shows “have always worked in one form or another,” he said, adding that people can still become involved in the shows because “the emotions are real, even if they’re set up in contrived situations.”

NBC actually had another dating concept planned for this summer that’s now being held until next year. The show, “Love Shack,” is described as a competition in which a man and woman move into a Southern California mansion “on a quest to find true love while competing against each other to win a one-year lease on a California beach house.”

Beyond the genre’s enduring popularity, television’s appetite for dating shows is also explained by simple economics: The shows are almost uniformly inexpensive, virtually guaranteeing an ever-expanding menu of such programs.

Moreover, when successful, they often appeal to younger viewers--the kind soft-drink and fast-food marketers covet--who still play the dating game and get drawn into the unreal “reality.”

To many, however, they remain a cultural oddity--another example of how easily anyone with seemingly dubious judgment can obtain a few minutes of fame. Aserinsky, the psychologist, said he watched “Jeopardy!” for 20 years and “never found myself wondering why they were on that game.” Not so with the dating shows. “You have to laugh, but it’s really sort of pitiful,” he said. “For this I bought a high-definition TV?”

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Louise Roug and Brian Lowry are Times staff writers.