We had casting people go out on the streets of New York, we had posted fliers, and people were more interested in the notion of doing a Netflix show.
One of the things that helped us to find people is that Netflix had carved out a brand already that was non-exploitative - a little smarter, a little cooler, a little more sophisticated. What we want now are ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. We’d put them on a desert island to win a million dollars, or we’d put them on fantasy dates in helicopters to see if they’d fall in love. The old mantra inside the business was, we’d take ordinary people and put them in extraordinary circumstances. Rossiter: Audiences, whether they realize it or not, are ready for a new type of unscripted television. They’re still sexy! They deserve romantic love!Ĭould you tell me about the process of casting the show? They’ve become invisible not just on TV, but in our world. Seniors, not older people who are 40 like me, seniors, who are often overlooked. We got along really well in our interview and I said to them, “I am interested if you will let me work with gay people, and especially with older people.” It’s never what the creators of shows or buyers of shows are interested in doing, investigating the stories of people who aren’t traditional television fodder. I thought, Oh, they’re two straight dudes, and that’s who always makes up dating shows.
I’d say no, and I’d say no, and I was so sure of myself that I was right that I never wanted to do another one.Īnd then Chris and Paul came to me with this one. Basically every creator of a dating show had come to me to see if I was interested in their shows. I decided to leave three years ago, and I decided to never do another dating show. I did a decade on The Bachelor and all of its spinoff-y shows. Rossiter: I have a dating-show background. That allowed us to show the distinct differences between how people date, but also the universalities, too. We wanted to offer up a diversity of the characters - different backgrounds, different ethnicities, gay, straight, a whole range of different people. We didn’t want to present a cast you’d see on every other reality dating show out there. We wanted to look at the dating landscape in 2019, and give an honest glimpse of what it’s like to be single in a world of infinite apps and infinite choices. How did you develop the show? Where did the idea come from?Ĭulvenor: We were speaking to Netflix very early on about what a dating show for 2019 would look like, and we knew we didn’t want to rehash all the reality-show tropes that’d been done for years and years.