An ultra-wholesome Japanese dating series on Netflix has hooked viewers globally. Photo: Netflix
An ultra-wholesome Japanese dating series on Netflix has hooked viewers globally. It's part of a wave of reality shows showing the nuances, and differences, of gay relationships.
It is a concept that we've seen many times before: a group of strangers enter a house and, as cameras film their every move, they search for a romantic connection. But conceptually, Netflix's The Boyfriend is actually a million miles from the Love Island villa, where singles with chiselled abs search for love (and Instagram fame).
The Netflix series is Japan's first ever same-sex dating show - a landmark moment for LGBTQ+ representation.
The premise is simple: in Tateyama, a quiet coastal city in Japan, a seaside beach house known as the "Green Room" becomes home to a group of nine young men from different backgrounds, from product designers to artists, models, students, and chefs. As their stories unfold, a group of commentators - including Japanese actress Megumi, pop star Thelma Aoyama, and comedian Yoshimi Tokui - provide a humorous running analysis of every moment, misstep, and micro-drama.
Words like "groundbreaking" are overused in TV criticism, but The Boyfriend feels genuinely deserving of it.
The Boyfriend has a low-key feel, with the contestants helping to run a coffee truck together, as they look for romance Photo: Netflix
Since the first episodes dropped on Netflix on 9 July, the show has been positively reviewed and much discussed on social media by viewers around the world - mostly because of how different it feels to the more over-produced, conflict-heavy dating shows we're used to seeing.
In the Green Room, romances form over a blink-and-you'll-miss-it glance, a flirty beachside picnic, or a letter posted under a bedroom door. And the show is part of a wider shift, where a new wave of LGBTQ+ dating shows - like BBC Three's I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl in the UK - are showing viewers a more wholesome side to romantic reality TV.
The secret of The Boyfriend's success
TV critic and writer Scott Bryan, host of BBC 5 Live's Must Watch podcast, thinks the success of The Boyfriend is down to it existing at the meeting point between wider TV trends.
The first being that TV shows that are not in the English language have become gradually more popular on streaming platforms since dystopian Korean drama Squid Game became Netflix's all-time most-watched show in 2021.
"Sometimes, watching a show with subtitles means that you actually become much more absorbed in it," Bryan says.
"Because you're not scrolling on your phone or looking at another screen, you actually have to watch it."
Then there is the show's production set-up, with the group of commentators providing a sense of narrative cohesion and witty asides: this is an extension of the format of Married at First Sight UK and Australia, where the "experts" watch group events such as dinner parties.
"The fact that you have these personalities providing instant reactions, rather than syphoning that off to a separate programme, is great. It makes the show easier to follow and it also makes the raw footage of the participants feel more organic and authentic in comparison."
There is also a more thoughtful, quietly sincere quality to both the contestants and the show as a whole that makes it stand out.
The Boyfriend has a distinctly "back to basics" feel about it. The group are tasked with running a coffee truck together and managing how they spend the profits to cover their household budget.
As the name suggests, the show is about finding romantic love, but over the course of 10 episodes, which have been released two at a time throughout July, the group have also formed deep friendships. Fans have been won over by the brotherhood between the men (and even their taste in menswear) almost as much as their unpredictable romances.
In 2023, BBC Three's I Kissed a Boy, presented by Dannii Minogue, became the UK's first-ever gay dating show. (It was followed by I Kissed a Girl, starring a group of queer women, in 2024.)
Dan Harry, a participant on I Kissed a Boy, was initially unsure when he was approached by a casting producer.
"I was extremely cautious," he says. "Because there were no reference points for this. There were no other gay dating shows for me to visualise what it was going to be like." But this ended up being what convinced him to take part. "I realised it could turn out to be a bit of a landmark TV moment. I wanted to be a part of that."
Watching The Boyfriend, and both I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl, what is noticeable is how direct the communication is between the couples. Proper conversations between the contestants about their backgrounds and emotional lives come to the fore much more quickly than on a show like Love Island, where talk for a long while mostly seems to revolve around superficial flirting or "grafting".
Rejections are often delivered more constructively and, in general, these shows have felt noticeably kinder and less manipulative of their subjects than majority-straight shows like Love Island, Love is Blind, or Married at First Sight. "There's a really big difference between Love Island and something like I Kissed a Boy," Harry explains. "On I Kissed a Boy, you see our stories and our backgrounds, our upbringings, and our deeper emotional feelings, whereas within Love Island pretty much everything is about what happens in the bubble of the villa."
Most dating shows - especially ones which brand themselves as an "experiment" - trade on an element of fantasy. Despite I Kissed a Boy and I Kissed a Girl's escapist setting at "the masseria" (an Italian farmhouse), however, Harry thinks the appeal of these shows is actually grounded in their normality.
"People were drawn to watching an extremely normal set of people having conversations that you would be having with your mates at pre-drinks, or in your group chat, and seeing it on screen for the first time," he says. "We were talking about anecdotal things which most gay men can relate to."
Dating shows and LGBTQ+ representation
Compared to scripted TV, reality TV has been ahead of the curve when it comes to LGBTQ+ representation. In the UK, Brian Dowling famously won Big Brother in 2001, as an openly gay man, via a landslide public vote. In 2004, he was followed by Nadia Almada, a trans woman who won the fifth series of UK Big Brother, which was a similarly seismic moment for LGBTQ+ representation.
But when it comes to dating shows, reality TV has lagged behind. In the 2000s, I grew up watching shows like Playing it Straight - a ridiculous spectacle where a woman had to identify gay men who were pretending to be straight, while on the hunt for the love of a genuine straight man, in order to win a cash prize.
The 2004 dating show, There's Something About Miriam, took this sensationalism to new extremes. Here, the trans identity of 21-year-old Mexican model Miriam Rivera was deliberately concealed from the men who were competing to date her. (After Rivera's death in 2019, the making of the series was explored in Wondery podcast series Harsh Reality and the docuseries Miriam: Death of a Reality Star.)
More recently, LGBTQ+ people have either been excluded entirely from existing dating show formats, or awkwardly inserted into them as a minority.
Married at First Sight eventually started to feature the occasional same-sex couple on its UK, US and Australian versions, but these shows haven't taken the opportunity to explore the nuances, and differences, of gay relationships. By comparison, exclusively gay dating shows are able to delve deeper into some of the ways that queer relationships might operate with their own challenges, norms, and expectations.
Bryan says that there is a "newfound confidence" that these shows can portray LGBTQ+ life as different, but not worse, and that they "won't stereotype or simplify" the queer experience.
On I Kissed a Boy, we saw the contestants talking about everything from coming out to preparing for sex, body image, and their different views on gay hookup culture. And on I Kissed a Girl, viewers learned about everything from some of the women's insecurities about using the word "lesbian" to a glossary of lesbian-specific dating terms like a "golden retriever" and the ever-elusive "black cat". Bryan thinks that these changes are largely down to more LGBTQ+ creatives being in leadership roles behind the camera, "so the overall product can show us that there is no one-size-fits-all way to be queer".
As The Boyfriend reaches its very tearful conclusion, some of the group leave the Green Room in couples, while others depart without finding love, but with a greater sense of self-acceptance and belief. The final two episodes place an emphasis on kindness.
"Be kind to yourself," Alan Takahashi says to fellow contestant Dai Nakai, who finds himself at an agonising crossroads with his on-again, off-again love interest, Shun Nakanishi. "Kindness truly has magical powers."
With The Boyfriend proving that a gentler approach can still create engaging reality TV, this is a message that all dating shows can probably learn from. And when it comes to TV reflecting more sides of LGBTQ+ life, it feels like these gay dating shows are just the beginning.
"Reality TV is now showing us that queer people are fully rounded people with different thoughts and feelings and desires," Harry says. "We're not just there to crack a joke, or be tokens. Now, we're the main characters."
The Boyfriend is streaming on Netflix now
