After Adolescence, Amanda Holden’s dating show comes at the perfect time

The dating show is in crisis. 

Love Island is on its knees, faded into insignificance beyond obscurity. 

It wasn’t long ago I would have given my life for Ekin-Su, but today I couldn’t pick the last three Love Island winners out of a line-up of unnervingly groomed Gen Z influencers. 

Married At First Sight is still enjoying its peak success but for how much longer? Its seasons are painfully long, the format was successfully switched up to replicate the chaos of its Australian counterpart in 2021 but four years later it feels like television of the past, before Love Is Blind UK came along and proved viewers want to watch people fall in love, not out of it. 

Following the success of Love Is Blind UK, it would make sense that Netflix has perfected a formula for the dating show that feels fresh and comes with appeal for those of us who have grown up and moved on from vapid shows like Love Island. 

Enter Cheat: Unfinished Business, Amanda Holden’s first dip into the lucrative world of streaming services where, against my better judgement, is where it appears she belongs.

It might sound like an odd comparison, but as this new dating series shows men breaking down their toxic masculinity to face their cheating pasts and become more comfortable with being vulnerable, it feels particularly timely after the release of Adolescence.

The four-part drama, which explored the very real threat of incel culture in schools and manipulation of young men to hate women, is perhaps the most important piece of television for years, finally addressing the problem of what it means to be a man and how that impacts the rest of us. 

Then you have this new dating show, where men are being taught to redefine their masculinity, untangle the fabric of their manhood and feel the impact their behaviour has on the most important women in their life. 

The first four episodes, at least, are a surprisingly moving watch. 

The premise of Cheat: Unfinished Business is simple, eight couples are thrown together hoping to fix their relationship which has been curtailed by infidelity. 

They’re separated from their partner, or in some cases ex-partner, the house divided into two separate headquarters  where they’re living with other equally attractive strangers also in relationships going through a rough patch. 

Dating shows tend to have two clear goals – to create drama first and foremost, and possibly plant the seed for a new relationship along the way.

Cheat feels as though it may have been set up to do the same… but misses the goal, and accidentally feels better for it. 

Presumably, couples were separated with the hopes they’d succumb to temptation and hop into bed with another vulnerable contestant who shares the same uncertainty about their own partner. That doesn’t happen – at least not in the first four episodes shared ahead of its release.

If anything, Cheat’s strength is avoiding the toxicity of its rivals and instead producing a dating show packed with heart and important guidance all of us in relationships could do with hearing. 

Amanda’s joined by MAFS therapist Paul C. Brunson who has climbed the ranks of tacky dating shows to now host a respectable podcast imparting his wisdom on love of hun caliber celebrities. 

Listen to his episode with Cher Lloyd and I challenge you not to weep. 

What sets Cheat apart from so many dating shows at risk of extinction is its sincerity. 

Each couple has come with the intention to fix their relationship. If they’re putting on an act for their 15 minutes of fame they’re doing an immaculate job but from the first four episodes it feels as though this is a dating show with a difference. Planting the seed for a relationship to grow takes precedence before the drama. 

The couples are still generically Love Island levels of attractive (one couple literally met on Love Island) but the depth of their feelings and history is clear and the stakes feel so much higher for it. 

Cheat feels like it’s the beginning of a new wave of what the dating show should be, coming off the back of Love Is Blind UK – a wildly surprising triumph when it came to British shores for the first time last year.

Love Is Blind UK, another Netflix success, proved that audiences deserve and want more than blistering rows and affairs. 

Cheat shows love at its hardest. When the odds are stacked against all of these couples and one of them has betrayed the other in ways you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, it would be easy to rule them out. As the age ol’ saying goes: a cheat is always a cheat and move on. 

Clearly, it’s not that simple. At least not here. 

The cheater, which in this instance is always the man, comes in broken, pleading to get help. Leave their cheating ways behind them and salvage their relationship. 

Paul is there to get the bottom of why they have cheated without judgement. Alongside Amanda – who has been open about her own infidelity to first husband Les Dennis – they create a safe space for cheaters to grow, and for their partner to learn to forgive.

Straight men get a bad rep on dating shows. When I tell you most of the cheating here is done by men you won’t be surprised and it will do little to help their cause. 

But there is something special about watching men be vulnerable when they’ve grown up to be told to be anything but. 

I’m far more emotionally invested than I anticipated to be and while I personally thought the last thing we needed was more dating shows, it turns out we really did need one more. 

Cheat: Unfinished Business is available to stream on Netflix now.

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