Are you growing tired of the Bachelor franchise? Missing your daily dose of competitive group dating on Love Island? Can’t wait for the next installment of Love is Blind? Lifetime’sFive Guys a Week might be the perfect reality show to fill that void. Adapted from a British program of the same name, this unique dating format has a prestigious 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the first season of the 2022 dating show is currently available for your binge-watching pleasure on Hulu.
‘Five Guys a Week’ Sends Strangers to Live With Their Love Interest To Compete as Last Man Standing
On Five Guys a Week, the traditional group dating experience is taken to a new level by compressing it into just one week—and into the confines of one shared home. Each episode, a new woman leads the show, and invites five potential love interests into her home, outfitted with a couple dozen cameras to capture 24-hour footage. They all co-habitate together for the full week. Cozying up in cramped quarters makes for plenty of drama and awkward moments as they fight for the attention and affection of the lead. The men share bathrooms and bedrooms (occasionally even beds) in addition to a potential love interest. And everything is a group activity—they cook for her together, they go on dates with her together, and they meet her family and friends together.
Unlike typical high-stakes dating shows where an engagement or even marriage is the end game, the goal here is simple: find someone worth dating in real life. With low-key drama and relatable moments—like arguments over the toilet seat—this reality experiment is part dating show and part social experiment.
Men are eliminated one at a time, beginning hours after they arrive. The group gets whittled down once a day until there are two remaining men, who share a romantic dinner with the lead, at which she chooses her match. Though a little research turns up no evidence that any of the resulting couples lasted in the long run, the show is wildly entertaining, and a zero percent success rate isn’t much lower than the likes of The Bacheloror Love is Blind.
Lifetime’s Dating Show is Like ‘The Bachelorette’ Jammed into One Week
The show reads like a smaller, more claustrophobic version of The Bachelorette, except instead of a sprawling mansion, the competition unfolds in a tackily decorated Airbnb, often comically too compact to contain all six of its cast members. And in the place of lavish group dates with helicopters, skydiving, or scenic locales, Five Guys a Week sends contestants on awkward excursions to the rented-out corner of a local bar to endure the judgment of protective friends. And no episode is complete without a concerned parent asking one of the boys how soon they hope to have sex with a budding romantic partner—it never gets old watching grown men squirm in their seats, scrambling to construct a respectable answer as their competitors snicker nearby.
Contestant Rebecca Seidemann shared what drew her to being on the show after seeing a casting call on TikTok. “The comment said, ‘The tension between me doing this,’ and they replied with ’Just do it,’” she told the New Haven Register. “I ended up submitting a two-minute video for the application, and they reached out to me the next day.” She recalled how the casting process reminded her of a less stressful version of TheBachelor, and she hoped to find a “father figure” from the experience.
She also shared some of the concerns she had going into filming the show. “Let’s not forget about the bare minimum: people who are respectful,” she said. “I am very anxious about my space and was worried about them reading my diary or touching my stuff, but they were well-behaved,” she said.
So if you’re tired of tuning into the same old reality dating shows, Five Guys a Week is an unassuming single-episode entry to the genre that doesn’t take itself so seriously. It’s a fast-paced fresh take that swaps out over-the-top formulaic drama for something much more intimate.
Five Guys a Week is currently streaming on Hulu.
