Feel-good television
Why "First Dates Hotel" embodies everything I need in lockdown
© TVNOW / PR
The new season "First Dates Hotel" has started – and our author thinks it gives us exactly what we need to see right now. Is this the most honest dome show on German TV?
Others have acquired new hobbies over the course of the last Corona year, from knitting to baking banana bread. I got warm again with an old friend. For a long time he had almost completely disappeared from my field of vision. Now we spend many a lockdown evening in my bedroom. It is stable, gives me structure and makes me laugh. Good old TV is back in my life!
And with him I gave myself completely to trash TV. Even if I can hardly call the show I want to write about today as such.
I'm talking about the new season of "First Dates Hotel" that has just started. And for me it really is the epitome of feel-good television!
Very briefly on the content: The show is the extension of the daily format on VOX. Singles spend a blind date in the first-dates restaurant, hosted by chef Roland Trettl. In the hotel version, the concept is the same – singles register, VOX plays Cupid, both of them meet for the first time in a restaurant – only this time it is in a hotel in Croatia and in the evening a pool cocktail and the next one together Day can follow. So it's kind of the extended version. And I love it!
There are two reasons.
Reason 1: It's so damn normal
I claim that First Dates Hotel is currently the most honest dating show on the German television market (and I'm not afraid of "Are you the one" and the "Bachelor"). But the VOX show is different. It shows people like you and me. Sometimes they are quite embarrassing, of course, but sometimes also incredibly personable – and all of them completely normal. Here 82-year-old Annie is looking for a nice partner next to 22-year-old Kevin. There are also pauses in conversation and lousy dates, yes, but also this magical tingling sensation when there is an immediate spark between two participants and you can even feel it through the television. What is not there is too young, too old, too fat, too thin, too nerdy, too funny, too boring or too bizarre for this show. In 60 minutes you get to see so many different types of people than in reality in the last 60 days.
Reason 2: First Dates Hotel is balm for my corona soul
My hot new love is of course currently fueled by Corona. First Dates Hotel gives me everything that I can't have: a holiday feeling, a nice holiday home, cocktails by the pool, a dinner in the restaurant and casual flirting. The latter is what impresses me most of all: Everything is so damn casual! We almost forgot this feeling of lightness in Germany during the Corona lockdown. First Dates Hotel reminds us.
The show gives me such a safe, warm feeling that I don't even shrink back when two couples embrace each other as a greeting. I don't wonder if they are freshly disinfected when the hands of two dating partners are carefully touching on the table. It is as if my world of emotions would be smoothly integrated into what we once called normality.
It reminds me that there was a time when light-heartedness and lightness dominated our everyday lives. And it gives me the confidence that we will get used to them again quickly.