I noted in my post about how I got into writing of The Odyssey that I blogged about reality TV. For your information, my favorite reality TV show is MTV's Are You The One?.
Here are some anecdotes (some detailed, some not) about the show:
1.The show is currently in its 5th season
2. Episodes are on Wednesday nights at 9PM Eastern, 8PM Central time on MTV
3.The premiere was on January 21, 2014
4. Each season lasts 10 weeks
5. In a standard season, there are 10 ladies and 10 gentlemen who are flown out to a tropical destination to find love and win money. For each lady, one of the 10 gentlemen is her perfect match. The same goes for each man, with one of the 10 ladies being his perfect match. The goal is to find all 10 perfect matches and if they do that within 10 tries, they win $1 million dollars to split among each cast member.
6. In the 2nd and 5th seasons, there have been twists with the number of people on the show. The 2nd season featured 11 ladies and 10 gentlemen, where one of the 10 gentlemen had two perfect matches. (If he gets confirmed as a perfect match with one of them in the Truth Booth, the other one goes home with nothing). The 5th season has 11 ladies and 11 gentlemen.
7. Almost every cast member is from a different city, state, and/or country. The most common states represented are California, Florida, Texas, and New York, but the cast members are not limited to just those states. Some of them have been from Arizona, Illinois, or Georgia.
8. The Truth Booth has had some interesting twists in the last two seasons. In season 4, if the first Truth Booth came back as a perfect match, the cast would add $250,000 to their overall prize, otherwise no new money is added. In Season 5, they could take $150,000 to add to their prize and prevent a couple from ever heading to the booth again, or take the result of the booth without adding anymore money to the prize. The Truth Booth is the only way to confirm whether or not a couple is a perfect match.
9. The 3rd season was the first one with the blackout rule that penalizes the cast for getting zero matches at a match-up ceremony, and for each of season 3 and 4, the prize would be reduced by $250,000 for each one. In season 5, the prize is divided by two for each blackout.
10. Each episode has some kind of challenge where the cast members have to win to get a date, and the winners choose who they want to take (from the non-winners). These are the people eligible to enter the Truth Booth.
11. Match-up ceremonies are when the cast finds out how they're doing in their quest to find all 10 (or 11) perfect matches. They alternate who gets to pick their perfect match (i.e. ladies' pick one week, gentlemen's pick the next, and it rotates until the last week of the season). At match-up ceremonies, the host (Ryan Devlin) finds out about things that he wouldn't know about in the house since he isn't there except for the Truth Booth and the challenge.
I love blogging about this show for multiple reasons. I'm able to write about my own opinions of what is going on in each episode based on what happens, predict what happens later, and I also like that I can calculate probabilities of who is a perfect match with whom based on the truth booths and match-up ceremonies. The show also uses some interesting musical excerpts during certain moments of the episode, like when couples are locking in at match-up ceremonies or some of the more romantic moments. My Are You The One? Season 5 blog can be found at paulshenaytoseason5.com, and I would appreciate it if you took a look at it!
