Should You Have A Drink With Dates?

What Is This Thing?

In this scripted series, British singletons looking for love (or sex, or a distraction) meet for a first date, and the viewer gets to watch the sparks (or spats, or super-duper-awkwardness).

When Is It On?

Two half-hour episodes will air back to back 9 and 9:30 PM on The CW starting July 9.

Why Was It Made Now?

It wasn't; it was made in the U.K. in 2013 and is only now making its way to American television. From what I hear, though, first dates are just as fraught with potential awkwardness as they were way back then.

What's Its Pedigree?

Our good friends at Britain's Channel 4 -- who, between Humans, Catastrophe, the recent-ish addition of Black Mirror to Netflix, and David Fincher's imminent remake of Utopia for HBO is really rocking TV at the moment -- made Dates and stocked it with British character actors you definitely know: the first two episodes feature Oona Chaplin, currently on The Crimson Field on PBS; Neil Maskell, currently on Humans; Sheridan Smith, formerly of Gavin & Stacey; and Will Mellor, from the first season of Broadchurch. Future installments bring us Gemma Chan (Humans), Ben Chaplin (The Truth About Cats & Dogs), Andrew Scott (Sherlock), and Katie McGrath (Merlin), among others. Series creator Bryan Elsley formerly had a hand in Skins.

...And?

We've all, at some point, been seated in a restaurant next to a couple who have clearly never met before and gradually tapered off our own conversations to eavesdrop, right? RIGHT?! It cannot possibly just be me. (Best-case scenario: when you're alone and don't have to pretend to keep engaging with your own companion and can just pretend to read. Or, better yet, live-tweet it.) Dates reconfigures that voyeuristic experience and improves on it: it casts interesting actors and lets them play out situations where you know shit's going to go down, unlike some first dates you spy on where things just boringly work out and everyone ends up happy. But, just as with real dates, you can't tell what kind of bad it's going to be from the start. In "Mia & David," the first of this week's episodes, one tries to ditch the other once they're within actual visual range of each other but then reverses course; the attendant hostility inherent in the situation ebbs and flows in ways that feel natural while also being unpredictable. "Jenny & Nick" falls apart in a showier way that's also more suspenseful. (When the "plot" of a show is basically "people meet and talk to each other for a while," pretty much every detail is a spoiler, so forgive my coyness, but if you're going to watch it I don't want to be too specific about what twists those conversations contain!)

As well, judging from the episode titles and the photos on The CW's press site it appears as though daters from previous episodes return in later installments to be matched with other potential mates, which is such a smart wrinkle to add, and foregrounds the mystery of dating itself: how does that chemistry work? Will someone who seemed abrasive the first time we met him or her be completely different opposite someone else? Will a bad date late in the season make that first one seem better by comparison? After we've met everyone, will we be mentally matchmaking them with one another ourselves?

I know this sounds like a narrow focus and a simple idea, but that's actually exactly what I like about it. More and more, American shows (especially network shows) come to air so overwrought and complicated; people get together romantically for logline-able reasons; what seems like a standard murder mystery is just a cover-up for a baroque government conspiracy that also involves aliens and mind control somehow; etc. The pitch meeting for Dates was probably five minutes long, and the clarity of its premise is supported by the confidence of its execution. Every relationship show doesn't have to have a whole mythology, How I Met Your Mother!

...But?

It's probably just as well that it's only nine episodes, because even if there were more than the one season, I doubt it's going to do well enough that The CW would bring it back if it could: it's an extremely weird fit for The CW. This is a channel that has never done well with half-hour shows, and this one doesn't even have the decency to be a comedy. Even more bafflingly, it's about people who are in their thirties OR OLDER. Sure, some of them are parents, but (as far as I can tell) not parents of demon hunters or artificially inseminated virgins. A lot of viewers who are used to turning on The CW and finding a DC Comics hero are going to be very confused by this thing.

I get that this is precisely why executives probably thought they might as well give Dates a shot in the summer rather than reruns its core fans already watched, tweeted, Tumblrd, and giffed the hell out of the first time through, but Dates is also...not summery. London has never looked chillier than when lonely singles are standing on its streets, not getting along. Which leads me to the final strike people might raise against it: it's interesting and compelling, but, so far, it's not exactly fun.

...So?

If you loved In Treatment and miss spending a half-hour with a person working out his or her issues one-on-one for a half-hour, Dates is a great replacement. If you saw the title Dates and thought it would be a lot of cute outfits getting into romcom misunderstandings, please: watch Royal Pains instead.