You are brought into a room with your partner where the invigilator, television’s Nick Lachey, guides you to a computerised table. Normally Nick Lachey is accompanied by his wife, Vanessa Lachey. Presumably the computerised table is his new wife. Nick Lachey’s Computer Wife (a new TV pitch?) fills with the headshots of the other people who live with you on your sex island.
Some of them are already romantically “matched”. These include Dom, whom you will, if you have done your homework, recognise from The Mole, a show in which hunks had to guess who among them was a spy (usually the hunk with the fake moustache and monocle), and Francesca, who was on Too Hot to Handle, a show in which hot people try not to have sex (hot-people problems, eh?), and Joey, who you will recognise from The Circle, where people create online personas and trick each other (it’s also the name of a shape, but that’s old and useless knowledge kept alive by scientists, priests and toddlers), and Kariselle, who you will recognise from both Sexy Beasts and the word “carousel”, which is a form of roundabout. Kariselle is not a form of roundabout. She is a form of human, not that you’d know it from Sexy Beasts, a show in which people go on dates while dressed as nightmarish animal-headed hominids.
Some new faces turn up on the horizontal flat-screened face of Nick Lachey’s Computer Wife. They are so hunky they are bursting out of the frame. They include Damien from Love Is Blind, Chase from Too Hot to Handle (“Chase” is allowed to be a name now), Calvin from The Circle and Will from The Mole. Using your extensive knowledge of reality dating shows, you must set about breaking up the already matched couples by introducing the correct televisual hunks into the fragile ecosystem of your erotic archipelago.
Anyway, that’s the gist of Leaving Cert English paper one. Make sure to answer every question. Alternatively, you may write an essay on Hamlet while I shout “nerd” at you.
Patrick Freyne: My favourite corporate psy-ops of the season – or Christmas ads, as they’re called in the suburbs
Doctor Odyssey’s core message: just imagine Pacey from Dawson’s Creek holding you tight and saying, ‘Shhh, it’s okay’
Rivals: The thrusting bum is intercut with spurting soap and overflowing champagne. We are in safe, if filthy, hands
The 2 Johnnies – what you get if you feed Ant and Dec a Tayto sandwich after midnight – are taunting us now
This scenario also happens on the first episode of Perfect Match (Netflix). What’s clear now is that many people are now trapped in a cycle of reality-television dating shows and even more people are trapped watching it. It is an endless Kariselle, if you will.
At the start of the programme, as hunky veterans of other shows enter the vast halls of the show to quaff champagne and flirt, it is clear that they all recognise one another, are familiar with the entire canon of western reality television, and would completely ace Leaving Cert English paper one. They are all still romantic optimists. They have tried everything – marrying someone they just met, dressing up as a panda – but, somehow, have not yet found love. As Nick Lachey puts it: “You guys have all made incredibly bold choices in the name of love.”
They introduce themselves to each other and also to their best friend, the camera. Francesca says: “I’m supersexy. I don’t have to try real hard if I’m to be honest.” This is also, coincidentally, what I said at my recent Irish Times employee review.
Joey says: “Things are going to get dirty, they’re going to get raw and they’re going to get weird real quick – and I’m here for all of it.” Which is, coincidentally, what my editor said to me at my recent Irish Times employee review.
Kariselle finds herself hooking up with loud-mouthed Joey, with whom she has been in an unsatisfying relationship before. Poor Kariselle: she seems to be endlessly turning round and round and ending up in the same place.
“The dress is fantastic,” says Shayne, who almost married someone he barely knew on Love Is Blind. He says it to Ines, who was in the French version of The Circle (a question on Leaving Cert French paper one).
“It’s a jumpsuit,” says Ines.
Shayne, who has no chill, disintegrates into a sweating, gibbering lump. The last couple end up together by default. “I guess we ended up together and that’s just fine,” Zay says to Anne Sophie, which I believe is from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. (Don’t worry: you don’t need to know that. It’s from the old curriculum and not part of the exam.)
The best couple is Vanessa (The Circle) and Nick (also The Circle), who have no chemistry and instantly start Dangerous Liaisoning the joint like a modern day Close and Malkovich. Using their nefarious wiles they get themselves into a position where they take Leaving Cert English paper one (as outlined in the opening paragraphs) and then introduce to the house two new males who go on dates with Sophie and Kariselle. Kariselle drinks tequila on her date and, appropriately, her head is soon spinning. Sophie’s date, Calvin, wants children and says it in the most romantic, least terrifying way possible: “I low-key, like, want someone to have my seeds. Like, I don’t want to just die. ”
Now there are five women and seven men. This is destabilising to the fragile heteronormative biome on Perfect Match and might, if left unchecked, lead to unrest. So in the next episode the surplus males will probably be humanely culled by park rangers and their delicious venison sold to local restaurants (or so I assume; this is what happens with the deer in Phoenix Park).
Speaking of sex and death, Perfect Match shares the “Top Ten TV Series watched in Ireland today” bar on Netflix with two creepy true-crime documentary series, My Lover My Killer and Meet, Marry, Murder, and, also, the ongoing serial killer drama You. I might start locking my door.
You is the least worrying, because it’s not being opportunistically spun from real-life trauma. It’s all just bad fun. The anti-hero Joe Goldberg is played by Penn Badgley, who was named, I believe, by his father, ChatGPT. In season four he’s renounced his killing ways and has a new identity, fancy mansion and career as a professor at a London university, because that’s a really easy job to get when you’re a drifter with no papers. Like a four-year-old, Badgley narrates everything: quotations the show’s writers found on the internet, bad jokes, things we can literally see happening in front of us and don’t need narrating. He never stops talking. I frequently find myself shouting “Shut up Penn Badgley!” partly just because his name is fun to shout.
Badgley’s incessant stream of consciousness makes me worry about the relative emptiness of my own interior life, which is, being totally honest with you, largely made up of simple colours and shapes. In the new series, possibly anxious about what the success of their murderous misogynist means for the world, the creators have pivoted to satirising horrible rich British stereotypes who then die horribly. I know what they’re at. I’ve also seen Glass Onion. A word of warning: if the superrich who fund TV and film are content to have their vacuity lampooned, this probably means they are completely unworried about ever having their wealth redistributed. You season four is what we get instead of the revolution.
