“Boy Meets Boy,” the new Bravo cable channel show featuring 15 handsome bachelors and one more handsome bachelor selecting one of them for potential romance, strikes an important blow for equality.
It proves a gay reality dating show can be every bit as tedious as its straight counterparts.
Even more so, really, because the producers of this six-episode series seem so determined to make everybody nice and wholesome that they either ignore or miss the moments of cattiness and conflict that give, say, “The Bachelor” what little interest it has.
Designed to take advantage of Bravo’s success with the much more engaging and original “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which features crisp gay men making over schlubby straights, this one knocks off “The Bachelor” in most of the details, substituting half-full champagne flutes for roses, for instance. But it has the added twist that an unspecified number of the contestants are actually straight.
The guys who’d prefer Eve to Steve are playing not for romance, but the chance to win all of $25,000 if they are the final object of “leading man” James’ eye.
James gets the cash if he selects from the right team. And there’s a New Zealand vacation for somebody, too, although the news release is a little confusing about who.
Anyway, if you’re thinking $25,000 before taxes is really not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, congratulations: You are entirely too intelligent to end up on a reality show, especially a low-rent effort like this, which airs at 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday.
In hopes of keeping people entranced by the is-he-or-isn’t-he question – yawn; that’s, like, so 1994 – the show doesn’t let viewers discover the contestants’ orientation until they are asked to leave.
But James, a seemingly very sweet 32-year-old benefits administrator, doesn’t even learn that there are straights among the “mates” until midway through the series.
If you’re thinking this is kind of cruel, especially on what is otherwise so milquetoast a show, congratulations again. You’re right, and the producers’ attempt to justify this as a challenge to “preconceived notions of what is considered gay and straight behavior” holds little water.
Whatever sociological lessons may be gleaned here aren’t compelling enough to justify pulling the rug out from under poor James. But, honestly, this show is so dull that its morality is almost irrelevant.
In another questionable decision, producers have decided to include in the mix a Grace to James’ Will, his female best friend who helps him sort through the fellas. Their repartee, alas, is not only not sitcom-worthy, it doesn’t even meet the meager standards of reality television.
It’s nice that there’s a gay dating show on a national television outlet. But, homo-, hetero- or aggressively pan-sexual, bad TV is bad TV.
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(c) 2003, Chicago Tribune.
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AP-NY-07-28-03 1426EDT
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