Netflix's Blissfully Dumb Perfect Match Is Ideal Background Viewing

Last December, in the lazy hammock week between Christmas and New Year’s, The Ringer TV critic Alison Herman tweeted, “emily in paris is made to watch while you scroll on your phone and yet it has subtitles, requiring me to look up from my phone. I resent this.” 

Even those of us who love TV know there is a class of show whose entire purpose is to play a few feet behind one’s phone hand. And while Netflix is home to dozens of shows that have been critically acclaimed and showered with awards…it’s pretty great at making second-screen shows, too. There’s Nailed It, where you really only have to glance up when the amateur bakers’ creations are unveiled. There’s Get Organized With The Home Edit, where you’re just there to see how much of a celebrity’s home they deigned to expose to cameras. There’s a whole swath of competitions—The Circle, Too Hot To Handle, Love Is Blind, among others—where the participants all scream everything they’re doing, so you only need to remember there is a screen when the music cues you that someone’s showing their butt. Now, alumni of this last category of shows get to mix and mingle in their own quasi-spinoff, Perfect Match. Think Battle Of The Network Stars, But Horny.

While the elderly Bachelor franchise is plagued by scandal, production company Kinetic Content has created its own class of romance shows. In Lifetime’s Married At First Sight, based on a Danish format, hopeful singles let relationship “experts” pair them with partners they will meet for the very first time at the altar. Netflix’s Love Is Blind (which aired its second and third seasons last year) challenges singles to create intimacy through days of conversation in “pods” connected by an opaque screen; would-be couples only get to meet after a marriage proposal has been accepted. The Ultimatum: Marry Or Move On premiered in 2022 and dares established couples to do exactly what its title suggests, by letting partners try living with a potential new love interest.

Inevitably, many of these shows’ romances don’t work out—but that’s where Perfect Match, Kinetic’s newest project, comes in. It’s basically a knockoff of Bachelor In Paradise (which is itself a knockoff of Love Island): ten singles meet in a luxury villa. After a brief mixer, they pair up, then compete in challenges to prove their compatibility. The winning couple gets to choose two new participants, from a pool of Netflix reality show alumni, to date people who are already matched. Then there’s another mixer, at the end of which the two people who remain unmatched get evicted. So it goes through the season, until five couples are left, and everyone else who cycled through the villa votes on which is the Perfect Match. 

It feels safe to assume that anyone who’s read this far has some pre-existing interest in reality romance, and isn’t planning to start with what is essentially a dating Thunderdome. So, dear reader who is still here: yes, Perfect Match is the right kind of stupid. (So are the singles themselves, who don’t fear leaping into a pool of foam but panic when asked to label as many countries as they can on a blank world map.) 

Their mere presence on this show seems to have convinced the participants that they’re A-listers we all know and love—even Kariselle Snow, whose previous star turn was on Sexy Beasts, where her entire head was covered with a gigantic panda mask. She describes her tumultuous hookup history with another Netflix star in a tone that assumes we’ve been watching it play out in the pages of People magazine, or at least their Instagrams; maybe some viewers have, but probably not most. (At least Love Is Blind made a meme king of Shayne Jansen, who also pops up here.) Self-delusion at this level made me, at least, feel tender toward most of the cast…