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Yes,NetflixsDating Aroundis yet another reality show about dating and romance.
How did you develop the show?
We didnt want to present a cast youd see on every other reality dating show out there.
That allowed us to show the distinct differences between how people date, but also the universalities, too.
Rossiter: I have a dating-show background.
I did a decade onThe Bachelorand all of its spinoff-y shows.
I decided to leave three years ago, and I decided to never do another dating show.
I thought,Oh, theyre two straight dudes, and thats who always makes up dating shows.
Seniors, not older people who are 40 like me,seniors, who are often overlooked.
Theyve become invisible not just on TV, but in our world.
They deserve romantic love!
The old mantra inside the business was, wed take ordinary people and put them in extraordinary circumstances.
What we want now are ordinary people in ordinary circumstances.
What would this more woke outlet do with the topic of dating?
The other thing is that we asked our casting directors not just go to bars and nightclubs.
And if hes all of those things, because Im a straight woman, Ill swipe.
And weve gotten lost in prescreening our dates.
So I asked our daters to just trust meeting a stranger.
I wasnt going to ask them 10,000 questions like, Do you love dogs?
Are you allergic to eggs?
How much money to do you make?
Because those questions need to be asked at the table in conversation.
I guess Im a little bit old-school.
What were the biggest challenges in making this show?
It was also people who werent looking for attention.
Or people who dont see faces like their own on TV.
Im a gay guy.
Or, Im a lesbian.
The lesbians were even more stressed than the gay guys were.
shes like, Eh, somebody asked me yesterday, Im not interested.
Do you know what I mean?
I do!Rossiter: So we had to go find people because they didnt answer the ads.
They didnt put themselves in the box that you tick for a dating show.
Culvenor: We really wanted to look for people who wouldnt go on shows like this.
But thats a brush that we painted across every aspect of the show.
Even the directors were people who came from more scripted and cinematic background.
The way we approached the music wasnt the traditional reality-show cues.
The post-production things were obviously done distinctly different from other shows.
Unlike pretty much every other dating show, this one doesnt do any talking-head interviews.
We wanted to stay in those moments.
Rossiter: I never wanted to do one interview.
Culvenor: That was a real credit to Netflix for trusting us.
A lot of other outlets wouldnt have had that same trust and wouldnt have taken that risk.
How did it actually work between when they go on the first dates and then pick a second date?
Did they tell you who they were going to pick?
Did you talk with them?
How much time passes?Rossiter: We worked with the lead daters for a week.
Most people cant go on five dates in five nights and still handle the regularities of their everyday life.
The millennials were texting more than the non-millennials were texting.
Most people, if they were asked, did give [out their] numbers.
Most of them did text a little bit after.
If you didnt feel like telling me, thats okay too.
But Im amazed how results-oriented people are in this.
It was just a wonderful evening, you know?
And Im so interested that so many people are like, What happened?
Are they in love?
Thats what I hoped the viewing experience would be the couple at the next table.
Theyre not jumping off a bridge with bungee cords, you know?
Theyre just hanging out.
