Lovestruck High (Amazon Prime) is the latest in a long line of objectively terrible dating shows that drag you into its vacuous dramas before you have the chance to realise that hours have passed and the light within you has dimmed to a compliant darkness that can only think in terms of who is going to be “pied off” next. The idea, which must have been flagged as “iffy” at any number of meetings but went ahead regardless, is that a bunch of Love Island-ish twentysomethings pretend to be going to an American-style high school, with the goal of finding love and winning $100,000 (£80,000). They are all British, bar one Irish guy, so I hope everyone is keeping an eye on the exchange rate. Sending heavily tattooed adults to a fake school for pretend lessons helmed by actors playing teachers who infantilise them, in the hope that they all hook up? I watched Open House: The Great Sex Experiment, so it’s hard to be surprised.
It owes an aesthetic debt to Sex Education, with its bright colour scheme and British boarding school meets American high school kitsch. But its biggest homage is to Made in Chelsea. It is shot in that distinctive scripted reality style – what is the technical name for an earnest chat about feelings encircled by a camera in the style of a lion stalking its prey? – with a lot of slow-motion shots of toned bodies “doing PE”. Everything is engineered to create unnecessary conflict and tension, which makes it hopelessly, shamefully addictive.
There are two original qualities. One is that it is narrated by Lindsay Lohan, who throws in as many Mean Girls references as she can without actually naming the movie, and chivvies along the action with commentary such as “Wow, savage” and “Geez, high school is tough”. Lovestruck High is heavy on the unnecessary interjections: each episode is about 48 minutes long, but it takes on the reality TV tic of extensively recapping things that have just happened, or painstakingly explaining things that are about to happen, and it could easily shave 20 minutes off its running time. “I’m kissing all these people,” says one newcomer, whom we have just seen kissing all these people.
The other innovation, if you can call it that, is that this isn’t the usual straight men and straight women competing for each other’s affections. The contestants here are straight, gay and all that’s in between. At first, this promises to add an ingredient that all dating shows should strive for, which is chaos; people aren’t sure who to ask to the homecoming dance, because not everyone is open about their sexuality to begin with. But it soon settles into cliques and friendship groups, and sexual preferences are the least of anyone’s concerns.
Mostly, this is scripted reality by numbers, and not even a milkshake at the diner after a cheerleading class against a backdrop of Mean Girls in-jokes can dress it up as anything else. The first three episodes “drop” at once, and the speed at which the drama moves is astonishing. Friendships, crushes and relationships form, collapse and reconstitute themselves, like a liquid metal Terminator. By the end of the third episode, when a small and completely predictable twist takes place, the entire cast starts to act as if someone has dropped dead right in front of them. It is hysterical, in every sense of the word. I was sucked in from the start, though I couldn’t help but wonder if the only person getting pied off was me.
