For people of a certain age (like ours), the Japanese reality dating series Offline Love will be nostalgic. In the series, ten singles explore Nice, France, without any digital devices, with the goal of meeting and falling for other singles involved in the show the way people used to do when they traveled in the pre-smartphone days.
OFFLINE LOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “DAY 1.” A shot of a cafe called Maison Margaux in Nice, France. A young Japanese man walks in.
The Gist: Maison Margaux is the hub of activity in the reality dating series Offline Love. There, ten singles — five men and five women — are told to lock their devices away in a box in the middle of the restaurant. The goal of the show is that, during the ten days the show is shot, the ten Japanese singles, all traveling in a city that’s unknown to them, will find each other the old-fashioned way, and foster their burgeoning relationships via written notes that are dropped off at the cafe, in letter boxes adorned with each of their names.
The singles are all armed with a special guide book — think of the Lonely Planet books you might have toted around when traveling in the pre-smartphone era — which will be what they use to identify each other. On Day 1, they’re all told the rules of the game, and they wander around Nice, seeing the sights but hoping to run into someone else who is participating in the show.
Watching as the hosts and audience representatives are Takahira Kuruma, Matsui Kemuri and Kyoko Koizumi. The first two are from the comedy duo Reiwa Roman, and Koizumi brings the perspective of a Gen Xer to the mix.
Three sets of people encounter each other on Day 1, but only two of them are opposite-sex pairs. Sho and Mimi meet while on the waterfront and have dinner together. Kenaka and Kensuke meet each other in front of Maison Margaux. Kensuke, a comedian, makes Kenaka laugh by telling her he went on the show so he can eat good meals that are paid for. The two men that run into each other, Atsushi and Yudai, make a plan for where they might see women from the show the next day.
Meanwhile, Atsushi literally passes a woman named Maho with neither noticing each other’s guidebooks. The rest of the singles go to the cafe and write notes to random people to meet them the next day. And one of the ten singles shows up much later than the others.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Offline Love has the easygoing, almost gentle and romantic tone of The Boyfriend, another Japanese reality dating series.
Our Take: We traveled internationally in the pre-smartphone days, and sometimes we traveled by ourselves. We were armed with a map and a Lonely Planet or Let’s Go guidebook, and we got to know fellow travelers by, you know, talking to them. If we met someone we wanted to see more of, we had to set a time and meeting place and hoped we both remembered, which didn’t always happen.
That’s essentially how the ten singles are traveling in this show, albeit with cameras following them. Yes, there’s the added stress of being able to identify the other participants, and of course, the goal is to find someone that they would want to date after the shoot for the show ends. But it seems that pretty much all of the singles treat the show for what it is, a travel adventure where you might meet a companion and maybe have a sweet, whirlwind romance.
We liked the scenery and the wonder that these travelers have wandering around a romantic European city like Nice, and the cafe that serves as the show’s center hub certainly has that romantic feel, as well. Some of them seemed to enjoy being on their own, while others seemed to be a little sad that they didn’t meet anyone on the first day. But the entire tone of the show seems to be more encouraging of the daters, with the hosts hoping they meet someone early on during the ten days they’re in Nice.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: The final single contestant shows up at the cafe and puts his devices in the lockbox.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the hosting panel, who are both genuinely rooting for the singles to meet up and are pretty funny when they don’t. They catch the unusual, fenced-in spot where one of the contestants eats her sad solo dinner in the hotel room, which we noticed, as well.
Most Pilot-y Line: One of the single men writes a note and drops it in a random woman’s box at the cafe, then checks his box and finds a note in it. The hosts rightly call him out for not checking the box first.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Offline Love is a fun throwback combination of a travelogue and dating show, showing some Gen Zers meeting people abroad the way we all used to meet people before we all had smartphones.
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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Offline Love’ On Netflix, Where Japanese Singles Try To Find And Date Each Other In France — Without Using Their Phones appeared first on Decider.
