Bravo’s new dating show Love Hotel feels like it wants to give stars of the Real Housewives franchise the Bachelorette treatment, a chance to find a new lease on love, but alas it ends up simply feeling like more of a girls trip, with a few random guys thrown in. The show brings together four of the franchise’s famous faces, all of them newly-single, and sets them up on dates with a pool of eligible bachelors. Hosted by Joel Kim Booster, the series is light and entertaining, and supportive as far as these girls’ trips go, but ultimately it never seems to take itself that seriously as a matchmaking venture.
LOVE HOTEL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A love concierge, played by Joel Kim Booster, at the “Love Hotel” explains to his staff that they’re about to welcome some very challenging guests to their luxe resort, four women from the Real Housewives franchise.
The Gist: Bravo’s Love Hotel is essentially The Bachelorette as a Real Housewives spinoff. The new series stars 60-year-old newly-single Shannon Storms Beador (The Real Housewives of Orange County), 54-year-old empty nester Gizelle Bryant (The Real Housewives of Potomac), 36-year-old almost-divorcée Ashley Darby (The Real Housewives of Potomac) and 59-year-old twice-divorced RHONY OG LuAnn de Lesseps as they take an adventure to The Grand Velas Boutique Hotel in Los Cabos, Mexico to potentially be paired off with an eligible man. The pool of eight men seems to range in age between men in their 30s and 60s and the common denominator among most of them is that none of them watch TV or seem to have even a passing familiarity with Bravolebrities.
The women are given the chance to get to know the men for an evening before asking them out on a date the next day, but on this show, while there is some overlap regarding who likes whom, everyone stays upbeat and roots for others to find someone to connect with. It feels like there’s an unspoken but obvious vibe of “We are all having fun here and none of this is serious,” which means the stakes seem pretty low, as are the expectations that anyone will truly find their person.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While the premise of Love Hotel feels sort of like Hulu’s short-lived Back In The Groove, where a group of 40-something women get back in the dating game, ultimately it feels more like a remixed Real Housewives episode.
Our Take: Watching Love Hotel is more about the journey than the destination; right off the bat, it doesn’t seem like any true love connections will be made, so the entertainment of it all comes from watching these women commiserate together and watching them flirt (or not) with the men in the dating pool. (I have only seen a selection of early screeners, so I actually don’t ultimately know whether any meaningful relationships form, but I think we can say with some certainty… no.)
The show isn’t shy about showing clips of the women from their original shows which exemplify their relationship histories, often to comedic effect. (In episode two, the women are offered the chance to “steal” each others dates, something Gizelle jokes that Shannon should be used to by now, given her history of friends snatching her man. Harsh but fair, Gizelle!) To that end, this show is obviously in service of true Housewives fans and seems to be a supplemental spin-off that will delight die-hards, though it may be less appealing to audiences who haven’t been following these women and their journeys.
Sex and Skin: There’s nothing terribly suggestive or sexy in these early episodes.
Parting Shot: Ashley is walked back to her hotel room by her new crush, Wale, who bids her goodnight and gives her a kiss. She giggles and says good night, and in her confessional she announces, “Love Hotel is love hotelling, baby!”
Performance Worth Watching: Shannon Storms Beador gives us so many reasons to watch…for better or worse. She’s got an old-fashioned sensibility around dating, and when it comes to asking men out (or juggling multiple suitors), she struggles uneasily at first, which feels expected and is actually fairly charming. But she is also very quick to (wrongly) jump to conclusions about people, telling one man in his 50s, Earl, that she assumes he was married to a much-younger woman, her assumption being that the marriage ended in divorce, when it turns out, the woman was the love of Earl’s life and she died of leukemia. Earl cries, and Shannon’s assumptions linger in the air uneasily. Add to that the off-screen tension between Beador and host Joel Kim Booster and she’s definitely offering some drama thanks to our friend from the O.C.
Memorable Dialogue: “I’ve never been in such a romantic… clamshell,” says Gerry, the first guy that Luann de Lesseps asks out on a date. The show has arranged for them to enjoy champagne and oysters on the beach in a sitting area that looks like a prop from Ariel’s Grotto at Disney World.
Our Call: Love Hotel is generally a good-natured and clever way to give some fan favorite Housewives something new to do and new people to riff off of. If you’re a Bravo fan, STREAM IT. If you’re not and you’re simply hoping to find a new dating show to watch, this is still fun but might not be as rewarding for you.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.
