Game Tape #6: The dating show that got over 70M views
Your ick has been submitted
Game Tape is a weekly series where I highlight what I’m learning from a new media property. Today we’re talking about building payoffs into shortform shows.
The best shows are either an escape from our reality or an exaggeration of its absurdity. Dating shows, somehow, are both: an opportunity to project our own quest for romance onto some Other and an opportunity to look in the mirror and say, “well, at least I’m not that bad.”
It’s especially fun to see format innovations on such an evergreen topic: “The Button”, “Pop The Balloon”, The Tiktokified “Pop The Balloon”, various degenerates crowdsourcing their dating apps on Twitch, and Hot Singles NYC (rest in peace/good riddance). But I’ve been trying to understand why some shortform shows, even when built around the same topic, sit with me in such wildly different ways. We can learn a lot by comparing two relatively new dating shows:
Cava’s branded Bowlmates, an unscripted show where two singles build each other a Cava bowl based on their dating questions
Submit Your Ick, a scripted show where actors recreate various fan-submitted dating mishaps
Spend two minutes watching an episode of each before you continue!
Bowlmates has to live within the boundaries of Cava’s world, while Submit Your Ick is explicitly designed as an entertainment product. I’m definitely having more fun with the latter. It’s not really a fair comparison, but if branded content wants to act like real entertainment, then we should hold it to the same standards. For what it’s worth, Bowlmates is strong as far as branded shows go: it’s not too heavy handed with its product placement, each episode has shortform savvy edits, and it’s hosted by the fantastic and recognizable Daniela Mora. It looks like they got over 250,000 views across Reels + TikTok for their first six episodes, and the show is already prepping for its second season. But Submit Your Ick is a show I genuinely look forward to watching. It’s going gangbusters with over 500K followers since its launch in April, and an average of 1-3M views per weekly episode.
There are a few things that stand out to me:
I. Payoff design: begin with the end in mind
We’re drowning in dating discourse, so any new show that broaches the topic has to prove that its payoff is worth your time. But scripted and unscripted shows have to approach this payoff in very different ways.
In a scripted show like Submit Your Ick, you have the luxury of promising a payoff upfront — How will this date go wrong? — and then designing every second to escalate towards that conclusion. In some ways, the secret to a good shortform scripted show is just teasing a novel payoff and then actually keeping your promise.1 It’s more about the punchline than the set-up. Was it funny? Was it surprising? Do I want to see more of this? Every episode of Submit Your Ick is a self-contained story. I don’t care about the characters, I just want to see the funny twist.
In an unscripted show like Bowlmates, you loosely know what your payoff will be — Will they agree to a date?2 — but you don’t exactly know how you’re going to get there. The lack of a script makes it extremely high variance: you might have an episode where two characters just don’t click, or you might have insane chemistry that leads to something better than you could ever script. The key is to set up scaffolding to control this variance: your casting decisions, host presence, general format, or the stakes of your payoff are all tools to help you increase the baseline entertainment value of every unscripted moment. That’s why Bowlmates has structured sections like, “What’s your biggest red flag?” or “What’s the first thing you noticed about her?” But even though the scaffolding is done well, ultimately the final payoff is too low-stakes to justify the variance in getting there. Bowlmates’s payoff depends on us having an attachment to the characters, and a two-minute episode isn’t enough time for me to care whether or not they go on a date.3 People want to see crazy shit. Raise the stakes!4
II. Interactive by design: from the people, for the people
High-production shows feel top-down, like a studio showing you what’s cool. Low-production feels bottom-up, like a grassroots show or creator that you’re supporting on the way up. Submit Your Ick somehow manages to be both, because it’s interactive by design. Audience involvement is baked into the concept, and whether or not they’re taking your submission, each episode feels like it’s elevating something out of the comments and into a high-production show. It’s similar to the magic of SubwayTakes — it’s easy to spitball your own “take” in the comments section and feel like you’re playing some small part in the show’s universe.
Last week I wrote about how a show is a gift to your corner of the internet. Submit Your Ick’s community submission model, then, turns the show into a platform for gift giving. It’s a gift to see your dating stories elevated into a high production show, just like it’s a gift to share your own goofy dating stories in the comments. The numbers show as much: Bowlmate’s highest viewed episode has a 0.2% share rate while Submit Your Ick has a few episodes with a 1% share rate.
In shortform, format wins championships. SubwayTakes promises a hot take, Track Star promises a music challenge, Boy Room promises a ridiculous bedroom. You come for the payoff that you’re promised, which then earns you the privilege of building depth over time. Bowlmates does a lot right, but without a big payoff or an opportunity for community involvement, Submit Your Ick is just hands down the more entertaining format.
An easy way to test if people care about your payoff is to ride the coattails of an existing trend.
There’s a secondary payoff in seeing the final Cava bowl that the singles make for each other, but the reality is that no one is really watching for that.
Just riffing: one way to build a character-throughline would be to structure the show like The Button, where one character stays on each episode.
These stakes wouldn’t work for a short form show, but take a show like Love Is Blind, a longform unscripted dating show, as a comparison. Singles try to find a match and get married without ever meeting face-to-face. Those are crazy stakes! Imagine if the stakes for Bowlmates were just marginally higher, like you had to introduce the other single to your parents after the episode.