If the coronavirus has taught us anything, it’s that people will watch any old dating show under quarantine, no matter how staggeringly dumb it is. So with that in mind, Fox’s Labor of Love will probably end up as the biggest hit of the summer.
Because, and I really can’t stress this enough, Labor of Love is stupid. It is arguably the most knuckleheaded show I have seen in half a decade. You could take this show and bury it in the desert, and people would still be able to locate it from the stench of its utter, logic-defying stupidity. Watching Labor of Love is like pulling your brain out of your ear with a corkscrew and booting it into a lake. Let me try to explain.
In textbook dating show fashion, Kristy is a 41-year-old divorcee who must choose between 15 different hunks. Together they will, in the words of host Kristin Davis, “skip the dating and go straight to baby-making”. Because, that’s right, Labor of Love is a dating show where the prize is a real life flesh-and-blood baby. The entire show exists to help one woman choose a candidate to impregnate her. It’s a mating show, not a dating show. Love, as we’re told, is optional.
Clearly, we were already headed this way. Dating shows cannot simply be dating shows any more. We’ve had Love is Blind, where couples propose to people they haven’t even seen. We’ve had Married at First Sight, where people get married the instant they meet. Of course there was eventually going to be a show about women being impregnated by men they barely know. (...)
It doesn’t help that the potential fathers all feel like dopey offcuts from other reality shows. They all uniformly, regardless of age or background or race, look like slabs of battered ham. They’re all a bit too dumb, their emotional problems a bit too overt. They say things like “I appreciate the interactions we had” instead of actual human words. They look, obviously, like the sort of people who’d sign up for a reality show about getting a woman pregnant.
The format is awful, especially the part where the woman eliminates potential fathers on an iPad app. The house they all live in is awful, not least because one of the rooms is an infantilised man cave called “The Father Hood”. The tasks are all awful, ranging from the annoying (“look after some children at a party”) to the insulting (“get your sperm analysed”) to the apparently randomly generated (“spraypaint negative adjectives on to a car and then beat the car to death with a hammer”). Labor of Love is so terrible that it doesn’t even feel like a television series. It feels like a document designed to be presented to God as an argument for the total eradication of the human race.
Because, and I really can’t stress this enough, Labor of Love is stupid. It is arguably the most knuckleheaded show I have seen in half a decade. You could take this show and bury it in the desert, and people would still be able to locate it from the stench of its utter, logic-defying stupidity. Watching Labor of Love is like pulling your brain out of your ear with a corkscrew and booting it into a lake. Let me try to explain.
In textbook dating show fashion, Kristy is a 41-year-old divorcee who must choose between 15 different hunks. Together they will, in the words of host Kristin Davis, “skip the dating and go straight to baby-making”. Because, that’s right, Labor of Love is a dating show where the prize is a real life flesh-and-blood baby. The entire show exists to help one woman choose a candidate to impregnate her. It’s a mating show, not a dating show. Love, as we’re told, is optional.Clearly, we were already headed this way. Dating shows cannot simply be dating shows any more. We’ve had Love is Blind, where couples propose to people they haven’t even seen. We’ve had Married at First Sight, where people get married the instant they meet. Of course there was eventually going to be a show about women being impregnated by men they barely know. (...)
It doesn’t help that the potential fathers all feel like dopey offcuts from other reality shows. They all uniformly, regardless of age or background or race, look like slabs of battered ham. They’re all a bit too dumb, their emotional problems a bit too overt. They say things like “I appreciate the interactions we had” instead of actual human words. They look, obviously, like the sort of people who’d sign up for a reality show about getting a woman pregnant.
The format is awful, especially the part where the woman eliminates potential fathers on an iPad app. The house they all live in is awful, not least because one of the rooms is an infantilised man cave called “The Father Hood”. The tasks are all awful, ranging from the annoying (“look after some children at a party”) to the insulting (“get your sperm analysed”) to the apparently randomly generated (“spraypaint negative adjectives on to a car and then beat the car to death with a hammer”). Labor of Love is so terrible that it doesn’t even feel like a television series. It feels like a document designed to be presented to God as an argument for the total eradication of the human race.
by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Fox
[ed. Hard to believe the concept of "entertainment" has sunk this low.]
