What Is It About Dating Shows Where Contestants Can’t See Each Other?

From “The Dating Game” to “Sexy Beasts,” audiences love to watch daters fall for disguised partners.

Falling in love with a partner whose appearance is deceiving is a tale as old as time. In folklore, it’s a motif that crosses hemispheres, exemplified in “Beauty and the Beast”-type tales, in which a woman obliged to live with a beast falls in love with the animal, and later receives the happy surprise that the creature was a handsome prince all along. (The Aarne-Thompson index, which folklorists use to categorize story types, classifies this popular plot as No. 425C.) In “Sexy Beasts,” a dating series that premieres on Netflix on July 21, that conceit is interpreted literally and applied to all parties: Participants go on heterosexual dates wearing a mammoth quantity of special effects makeup. They attempt to establish a romantic connection without knowledge of any of their dating partners’ craniofacial features, apart from eye color and, in some cases, general interior mouth appearance. They must wear beastly skulls at said dates until their true countenance is unmasked — either because the participant has been eliminated from the dating contest, or has won or chosen their winner. For no particular reason, the show’s primary setting is Knebworth House, the grand Hertfordshire estate that stood in for Wayne Manor in the 1989 film version of “Batman.”