Is ‘Badly in Love’ Terrible Television or Brilliant Satire?

I began watching Netflix’s Badly in Love without knowing it was already in its second season. I had never seen the first one and, honestly, I had almost no reason to watch this. I rarely watch dating shows. I don’t believe in The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Love Island or whatever new laboratory for romantic desperation happens to be on television this week. I have always found the genre to be fairly poor entertainment based on an even poorer premise: put a bunch of attractive strangers in a house, manufacture intimacy, add cameras and editing, and somehow convince us that what we are watching is love. What caught my attention was that Badly in Love had become one of Netflix’s most successful non-English series globally, so I decided to see what the hell everyone was watching.

Then, less than five minutes into the first episode, two people were already fighting.

Okay. I’m listening.

The premise is already sufficiently deranged. Badly in Love is Japan’s first dating reality show built around the “yankii,” a Japanese subculture associated with delinquency, gangs, rebellion, street violence and a very particular kind of aggressively stylized Japanese cool. This season takes place in Okinawa and brings together nine young men and women with complicated pasts. There is a former yakuza, a rapper, a barber, a bar owner and a collection of people whose biographies seem to have been assembled by someone who thought the best way to find romance was to put the least emotionally stable people in the country in the same house and see what happens.

And, apparently, what happens is love. Love? Yeah. They say the word constantly.

What makes Badly in Love so awkward and extraordinary at the same time is the speed. The absolutely insane speed with which attraction becomes certainty. These people have barely met and already someone is looking at someone else as if they have discovered the person they were waiting for all their lives. A glance becomes evidence. A conversation becomes a declaration. A little attention becomes jealousy. Give them another 24 hours and they are discussing forever. I have been alive for 50 years. I still need considerably more than 48 hours to decide whether I like someone.

The physical appearance of the participants makes the whole thing even stranger. The men arrive looking as if they have spent more time preparing for a fight than a date, with tattoos, short hair, sunglasses and the intimidating posture of people who have had complicated relationships with authority. The women have their own version of the yankii aesthetic, with elaborate nails that appear to have been designed to kill small animals, aggressive fashion and a look that sometimes feels less traditionally Japanese than a hyper-stylized version of American street culture transplanted into Okinawa. Everybody looks as though they are about five minutes away from either falling in love or committing a felony.

Then there is the house itself. It looks like the inside of a giant pinball machine: fluorescent colors, violent neon, artificial surfaces and enough visual stimulation to make you wonder whether somebody accidentally built a nightclub inside an arcade. There is also a strange, almost robotic, childlike voice guiding the proceedings, which makes the entire thing feel like something John Waters might have directed after spending a weekend inside a Tim Burton fever dream.

Add in the commentators: Three people sit apart from the participants and watch everything for us, interpreting every look, every gesture and every emotional tremor with extraordinary seriousness. MEGUMI, the creator and producer of the show, is joined this season by comedian Nagano and Okinawa-born artist Awich. They function almost like the Greek chorus of this bizarre little tragedy, except that their solemn analysis of who might be falling in love with whom sometimes makes the whole thing feel like The Hunger Games. Nobody is waiting to see who gets killed. We are waiting to see who gets the girl.

Or the boy.

Or who punches whom before that happens.

On the second day, the participants can leave messages for the people they like in individual mailboxes outside the house. These are not the letters of Kafka to Milena, Balzac or Shakespeare. They are essentially variations on “I want to know more about you.” And yet people receive them with the emotional intensity of someone who has just discovered a lost love letter from another century. One person gets several messages. Another gets none. The unlucky rapper suddenly becomes the pathetic loser of the day, while everyone else analyzes three lines of handwriting as if they contain the secrets of the human soul.

At this point I started wondering whether I was watching a reality show or a very elaborate joke.

Netflix calls the program a dating reality show and a social experiment. But what exactly is the experiment? Is it what happens when you put a group of emotionally damaged, sometimes violent young people together and ask them to find love? Or is the experiment what happens when we, the audience, are asked to accept their behavior as love?

Because there are two possibilities here, and neither one is particularly comforting. The first is that it is staged. Netflix has taken people with traumatic histories, placed them in an absurdly artificial environment, accelerated every possible romantic trigger and filmed the inevitable explosions. If that is what is happening, then Badly in Love is the logical reductio ad absurdum of the modern dating show: take the already artificial machinery of televised romance and push it until it becomes completely insane.

But what if it isn’t?

What if some of these people really do experience attraction, jealousy and love at this speed? What if, after years of violence, addiction, broken families and failed relationships, what they are starving for is not actually love but human contact, intimacy and validation? What if the only template they have for that feeling is the one popular culture has been selling us for decades: love at first sight, soulmates, forever, the person who completes you?

Perhaps, too, there is a third possibility. The show may be functioning as a kind of cultural training ground: taking a marginalised subculture whose codes are built around violence, loyalty and aggression and putting them inside one of the most globally recognizable scripts for “normal” intimacy — dating, vulnerability, jealousy, coupling, romantic commitment. What fascinates me is that the participants are so easily socialised: they seem to embrace the script (whether implicit or explicit) almost instantly, even when their behavior remains completely at odds with it. So perhaps the experiment isn’t simply whether these people can find love, but whether the dating-show format itself can teach them how love is supposed to look.

Maybe the strangest thing about Badly in Love is not that it teaches us what love is, but that it teaches its participants how they are supposed to perform it.

Maybe there are two experiments happening: one inside the house, one to us. We watch these people fall for one another after barely knowing each other and think, that is not how feelings work. Then comes the uncomfortable question: what if, for some people, they do?

I still don’t know whether these people are acting. I don’t know how much Netflix is manipulating what we see. And after four episodes, I’m not sure I even want to find out. Because if this is fake, it is one of the strangest dating shows ever made. And if it isn’t, we may be looking at something considerably more interesting — and considerably more fucked up.