Five Guys a Week

The Channel 4 press office said,

Five Guys a Week is an antidote to traditional dating shows, offering the ultimate test of romance, compatibility and stamina by providing one singleton with five trial live-in boyfriends for a week – all at the same time.

The locally-sourced men, all meeting the picker’s exacting standards, will jostle for supremacy as they compete for admiration from the moment they set foot across the threshold.

The format fast-tracks the ‘getting to know you’ phase of a relationship and gives the dater a unique opportunity to compare and contrast five suitors in real time.

The men will go everywhere with their host en-masse: whether that’s to work, on a night out with mates, or for dinner with the parents, with a combination of fixed rig and roaming cameras following all the action. There is only one rule - the picker must eliminate four of the men by the end of the week, whittling them down to the last man standing. Will he turn out to be the perfect match?

Dating shows have become stuck in a rut, with increasingly contrived and artificial formats (from Blind Date in a studio, to Dinner Date in a kitchen, and to Groundhog Date over and over again). By comparison, Five Guys a Week is an organic dating format, it feels more honest and natural. One woman, in her own home, chooses between five visiting guys.

There are posts to hit - all of the guys sleep under the same roof as the woman. She throws them a dinner party on the first night - and the two remaining men cook her dinner on the last night. Someone will leave after breakfast each morning, they'll go out on the town for a party, the surviving candidates will meet people close to the woman. These points feature in almost every episode, but aren't indicated on screen. They just ... happen.

Five Guys a Week is edited to show interesting moments, primed for social media. The time when the host snogs one of the guys... and then dumps him the next day. The time when one of the guys plies another with alcohol, sees his rival throw up in the garden... and both get dumped in the end.

Five Guys a Week is also subtle in its feminist message. It's the woman doing the picking, it's the woman who hosts this event, it's her home fixture, it's her home. The guys have got to fit in with her life, change to meet her - not the other way around.

A gender-neutral series ran in 2022 as Five Dates a Week.

Wayne Roberts

Channel 4's press release elided one important point: the entire action takes place over two-and-a-bit days. The blokes arrive during Friday afternoon, and a winner's found by Sunday night. Not so much "five guys a week" as "five guys a weekend". Frankly, this is completely unimportant.

The first five episodes followed celebrity editions of Bake Off, after which the series paused until early autumn, when it followed episodes of Gogglebox on Friday evenings.

Channel 4 programme pages: Five Guys a Week, Five Dates a Week

@fiveguysaweek

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