Introducing ‘Kiss Bang Love’: The Latest Show Feeding Australia’s Obsession With Forced Intimacy

Perhaps propelled by the success of The Bachelor, Australians have been bombarded with a series of bizarre reality shows about relationships over the past few years. Married At First Sight hitched strangers for kicks, often resulting in spectacular fallout. First Dates was a “secret” look at the awkward world of fix-ups. Seven Year Switch aimed to mend long-term relationship problems by using “switch therapy” (not a real therapy technique, kids).

I kind of love them all, despite the fact that I can often feel my brain cells slowly oozing out of my ears. So I’m proud to announce that a brand new show, Kiss Bang Love, began last night on Channel 7. The show’s premise is “a good first kiss is the chemical pathway to love”, or in other words, “lets rub two sticks together and hope they make fire”. It takes its title very literally.

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Here’s What You Missed

The lucky girl who has her chance at love this week was Lisa, 28, who is looking for “someone that makes [her] feel all giddy”. Lisa is basically thrown in a room and told to kiss 12 guys, one after another, while both her and said guys are blindfolded. In between each, Lisa talks about the kisses while having exorbitant amounts of makeup applied to her face. Her sister and friend provide comic relief, watching her on a TV from the sidelines, champers in hand.

The kisses themselves are hard to watch. The first is really awkward with each person groping around, trying to find each other. One guy gives a series of short, sharp kisses, pulling away each time, which leaves Lisa looking uncomfortable and confused. All this is soundtracked by some cringeworthy smooching sounds that go for so long I pray for it to end.

“He had a good rhythm,” Lisa says of one kisser before clarifying there was “nothing forced” about the kiss.

Lisa’s friend’s comments, on the other hand, are hilarious. “I really don’t like the shorts,” she says of one contestant sporting a particularly high waistline. “They remind me of one of the primary school teachers we had.” Then: “I thought he was going for the boob grab”. And the best of all: “I thought that [kiss] was natural and not, ‘you’re in a nightclub and you’ve had 14 Jagerbombs’”. Lisa’s friends also have a surprise for her; they have brought in someone “secret” as a wildcard: a plumber, who allegedly went to her house and “did some plumbing” recently. (Yeah, I bet he did).

I like that this show is unapologetically cheeky. Lisa’s pretty nervous and mentions that her palms are sweaty. After wiping them on the sides of her dress she says, “my dress is just wet”. Realising what she’s said, she laughs. “That didn’t mean to sound like it did.”

Lisa then rates the kisses out of 10 and chooses five guys to kiss without the blindfold, which leads to another series of (possibly even more) awkward encounters. “What do you do for work?” she says. “How old are you?” and “Do you want to kiss again?”

Lisa then has to choose two guys to go on “24-hour” dates with (i.e. sleepovers). She picks the plumber, Ryan (because “he’s a little bit rougher, which is good”) and Jaxon, a self-proclaimed “new age guy” who “loves magic”. He’s apparently not her type at all, but he is “intriguing”.

Lisa and Jaxon go on a date which involves golf, archery and bouncing around in those big blow-up balls with only your feet poking out. “It was really fun, especially when we got into those big balls,” Lisa says. I honestly don’t know if this show is taking the piss with the dialogue but it makes my job so easy.

Lisa says that Jaxon “has a lot of likeable traits”, which makes him sound about as interesting as a piece of cardboard. Nevertheless, she chooses to sleeps over in his bed (they did have the option of separate rooms). Maybe it was because he played the guitar and they ate oysters at dinner.

The next date is with Ryan, who has arm muscles that Lisa describes as “the size of my face”. They have a bar-flair lesson, where they awkwardly toss around some cocktail shakers and Ryan is so tall he hits the light fitting. I love this show already.

“It didn’t feel forced or fake at all,” Lisa says again. I guess she means in contrast with the rest of the incredibly forced and fake show? At the end of the night they share a bed, presumably for the titular “bang”.

The next day, Lisa meets both boys at the airport, and decides to ditch Jaxon. She and Ryan go straight off on a holiday to Noosa, while poor Jaxon gets sent home. Ryan admits he has no idea where Noosa is, which is probably when Lisa started to realise she’d made the wrong decision.

The show ends with some happy snaps of Lisa and Ryan drinking cocktails. Did they fall in love? “We’ll catch up,” Ryan says. “Yeah, we will see each other again”, says Lisa uncertainly. The credits tell us that “Lisa and Ryan are still very close”, whatever the hell that means. Kiss + bang = no love.

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Why Are We Doing This Again?

Kiss Bang Love actually isn’t the only new show coming out with this premise. SBS are also developing Undressed: a series marketed as a “social experiment” (in the same style of Seven Year Switch) in which contestants have to ask strangers a series of intimate questions within 30 minutes, each question more revealing than the next. The catch is that they have to get undressed and hop into bed with each other first.

The idea behind all this is that attraction and intimacy can be “accelerated” by jumping into a personal situation, and that this could lead to love — and it actually has some academic backing. This concept originated with a 1997 study done by Arthur Aron, professor of psychology at the State of New York University. Though it didn’t mention losing your clothes, his study concluded that singles who asked a series of intimate questions about one another for 45 mins felt closer and more connected than those participants who instead engaged in small talk for the same amount of time.

Groundbreaking, right? But these questions have been used as the basis for a number of studies and now, seemingly, an enduring wave of reality TV matchmaking.

The “experiments” on screen, of course, have less basis in real life. Events that span over a series of weeks or months are often condensed, re-cut and edited (sometimes heavily), which creates dramatic tension. The “realities” are being heightened for entertainment’s sake. So why are we so obsessed with them? They reduce love to a series of questions, intimacy to a red rose, and therapy to a number of theatrical plot twists dubbed a “social experiment”, designed to entertain us. Do we like it because it’s easier or more fantastical than the real world?

One reason could be that we simply enjoy watching other people squirm. The heightened drama, even in the most unrealistic situations, helps us see how insignificant our own relationship problems may be, and the game-like format and light-hearted approach that many of these shows have can allow contestants to show refreshingly honesty. It’s a human science project, and we love to watch the results.

There’s also this voyeuristic element. These shows give us a rare glimpse of other people’s intimate moments, and invite us to offer our assessment. Would we sleep in the same bed together as Ryan and Lisa did? Would we be wooed by Jaxon’s magic tricks? We like to watch and judge, but most of all we like to see how our own experiences stack up against Lisa’s, or any other of the other contestants on these shows.

This probably isn’t great for us. Research on the effects of reality television aren’t an exact science, but in a study done by the University of Wisconsin, researchers found that people who watch a lot of it tend to have a skewed perception of love and relationships (i.e. they’re more likely to hound their best friend’s boyfriend because they’ve been watching too much Cheaters). This can lead to them changing their behaviours in the real world.

SBS’s Undressed is still casting (you can sign up here) and doesn’t yet have a start date. Even though the format is arguably more risqué (and really brings new meaning to forced intimacy), I think it will yield more successful results than Kiss Bang Love. Sure, a kiss can afford a rare glimpse into your physical chemistry with another person. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg in terms of an actual relationship.

With Kiss Bang Love, as opposed to shows like The Bachelor, I suppose the question isn’t whether any of the contestants will actually fall in love (and if we are going by the first episode, it’s very unlikely) but more how we engage with their experiences, and how that reflects on our own lives. Maybe we’ll learn that it takes more than randomly kissing a stranger to fall in love. But I’m guessing most of us have found that out already.

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Kiss Bang Love is on at 8.45pm Tuesdays on Channel Seven.

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Megan is a freelance writer based in Sydney. She works in advertising and is determined to end up as a crazy dog lady. She tweets from @meganjaneandrew.