Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Singletown’ On HBO Max, A Reality Series Where Couples Break Up And Date Other People, And Their Exes Know About It

Singletown first aired last year on ITV2 in the UK, and the idea behind it is in the vein of shows like Love Is Blind, where the people looking for love are subjected to a particular gimmick. Only here, these aren’t true single people, it’s five couples who have decided to go through this particular social experiment. All of these couples, whose participants are aged between 18 and 27, feel that things have stagnated in their relationship and they decide to break up — perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently — and spend a month going on lots of dates with lots of good looking people.

SINGLETOWN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes of London. “Welcome to Singletown!” says the announcer. “These five couples have split up, and they’re moving to the ultimate party city: London!”

The Gist: We see each couple’s break-up on camera — Claudia and Rob, Sophie and George, Jeremiah and Selin, Natasha and Luke and Elliott and Charlie — and each member of the couple moves into either a Riverside apartment facing the Thames or a Cityside apartment facing the Financial District’s skyline. The hosts, Emily Atack and Joel Domment, each advise one group of singles. Because of their need to confer, what the new singles don’t know is that their exes are in the same luxury condo building, with their apartments mere yards apart. At the end of most of the 15 episodes there will be a ceremony where the couples from one of the condos will decide whether to stick it out with their ex or break up.

We spend much of the first episode with the requisite move-ins and introductions, with each person facing a massive canvas photo of their ex in the living room, then one group gets ready for a mixer that very night. Selin is tasked by Atack to find someone that she fancies, but she still has Jeremiah, whom she’s dated since they were both in high school, too much in her head to really get into anyone. Elliott, on the other hand, makes a connection and Atack agrees to set up the date.

In the other condo, after spending the night seeing pictures of the party guests on screen and torturing themselves, they have a brunch mixer in the restaurant in the condo building. Jeremiah is especially smitten with one of the guests, but the drama comes when Claudia and George go out for a morning hangover buster and see the brunch — with both their exes talking people up — in progress.

Our Take: Singletown really, really wants to be a more sincere form of the dating reality series. The idea is that these longish-term couples are doing their own form of rumspringa, where they get to be single and date around to truly see if they want to stay in their relationships or not. It’s as if Ross and Rachel really did go on a break, and both of them dated around. Who doesn’t want to see if these couples can pass this test?

Well, after the first episode, we really didn’t. We’re not sure if it’s because the “breakups” shown looked extraordinary fake — “we’re breaking up for the show!” — but we just don’t think the show is anything more than a “young people having fun” show with the relationship component being the gimmick.

One of the things that make dating shows intriguing, be they veteran ones like the various Bachelor Nation shows or relatively new ones like Love Is Blind is that these singletons have been around the block, been in and out of relationships, and bring some baggage with them. The participants in Singletown are so friggin’ young — Sophie is 18, for heaven’s sake — and their relationships mostly pretty brief, you wonder if any of these people really tried to salvage things or that they would have broken up without the show just because, well, because they’re all so young.

The word “vapid” kept popping into our heads as we watched the first episode. For the most part, it felt like the contestants are more into their clothes and hair than actually fostering a long-lasting relationship with their new exes. But, again, that could be because they’re so young, with so little life experience (at least as far as we know; there wasn’t much backstory for any of the contestants aside from how they and their exes were as couples). If the producers had tweaked up the age range a bit, perhaps from 25-35, or 25-38, it might have helped us shake that feeling that we’re just watching a series of long fingernails and ankle-length pants.

Sex and Skin: Nothing’s going on, at least in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Rob sees a teary Claudia outside while he’s in the brunch mixer and says, “What the fuck, bro? Why is she there?” Then when the woman he’s talking to asks him if that’s his ex, he says yes then, “Fuck it, I’m going to talk to her.”

Sleeper Star: The announcer, Luke Kempner. He snarks off on the contestants and the hosts. We need more announcers that make fun of the hosts.

Most Pilot-y Line: Have you ever heard Adele speak? If you’re American, it’s hard to understand her sometimes, right? Now imagine ten contestants with variations of her working-class accent, from all over the UK. Let’s just say most Yanks will need to turn on the closed captioning if they’re going to decipher most of what these people are saying.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While it seems to be a fun social experiment, Singletown makes the mistake of emphasizing the young and pretty over people with some life and relationship experience. And the show suffers because of it.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Singletown On HBO Max