In this sense, "Offline Love" offered a very interesting premise because it was so old-school and analogue. In this digital world where convenience and speed are at our fingertips as long as we have smartphones and the Internet, having your electronic devices taken away for 10 days in a foreign land with nothing but a special guidebook and depending on destiny/chance to meet your match sounds really fascinating. No GPS, no online maps, no social media, no instant messaging, no search engine, cannot take photos and videos on your phone - can you survive without these for more than a week? Under normal circumstances, we probably wouldn't be able to last a day without our devices. And not to mention that you are in a foreign land without a translator app on your phone. What's more, you can't really contact your love interest in real time and have to depend on handwritten letters or meeting up in person to convey your thoughts and make date arrangements.
I've lived long enough to go through the era pre-handphones but wasn't old enough to be able to date at that time. As such, seeing this way of analogue communication was so nostalgic yet refreshing at the same time. Given that the cast in this dating show were 30 and below and wouldn't have experienced the inconvenience of not-so-instant communication in that era, it was actually funny at some point to see how they struggled with this setting initially. However, people do adapt quickly so when they got used to this mode of communication, the awkwardness slowly melted away and the interactions between the cast members got a lot more smoother. Then again, things which wouldn't have been an issue in this era would become more evident such as missing your date literally by inches even though you two are at the same place or that making plans and cancelling them aren't that easy to do anymore. More thought has to be put into the actions and intentions can sometimes be mistaken just by the written word (same issue as with electronic text messages though since there is no tone and facial expression). In a way, that also helped the cast to focus entirely on their dates and love interests rather than be too caught up with using their devices and depend on the convenience of the modern era to play the dating game.
What was also good about this reality show was how it offered the option of not making a choice. One thing which I really dislike about dating shows is that there would often be at least one or two cast members who couldn't find someone they wanted to choose or that the person they wanted was highly unlikely to choose them back. However, such shows never allowed people to leave on their own or give up their choices so it became a torture to see them choosing for the sake of choosing just to follow the rules of the show. I felt bad for the people who had to choose despite their intentions and those who were chosen because it came across as disrespectful and meaningless at the same time. Luckily, this show gave the cast an option to walk away on their own rather than making a silly choice for nothing so I was glad that it gave people the opportunity to do what they felt was best for themselves.
One other selling point of this show was the beautiful scenery in Nice and other cities in southern France such as Cannes as well as Monaco. Even if you view this show simply as a travelogue, I think it was indeed worth the time investment. There were also quite a lot of scenes showcasing the gastronomical delights on offer and the names of the places they visited were all indicated clearly. This will be useful for those planning to visit those places which is a good deviation from most dating shows in the past which tend to hide shop and location names for some reason - perhaps because there wasn't any commercial arrangement to allow that.
Coming to the parts which I didn't quite like - while I thought it would have been interesting to see Koizumi Kyoko as a panelist in a dating show, I was not so keen on having her sandwiched between two comedians who I didn't know in the first place. Nothing against them (despite one of them currently suspending his activities due to an ongoing scandal) but it felt like they were doing most of the talking so Koizumi became more of a secondary panelist who reacted to their questions rather than proactively talking about her observations or sharing her experience. While I can understand that she may not be comfortable leading the conversation, the composition of the panel could be more diversified if there are future seasons. The panelists' sections also felt like they became longer towards the end of the season - was it because there was lesser footage to air or there were more points they wanted to talk about? And accumulating a few scenes before making the commentary may not have been that disruptive because it reduced the back-and-fro but it also created the situation where you had to struggle to recall what happened much earlier in order to understand what the panelists were talking about. And honestly speaking, the set design for the panelists section was a tad disappointing. I also wondered if the panelists were comfortable sitting in those high chairs rather than comfy sofas in a more cosy-looking set than a largely-white background with drawings.
The part about people missing each other on the streets despite being in the same place - I can certainly understand that being possible in real life because there are times when I fail to notice an acquaintance walking past me or towards me until the other party grabs my attention by waving or doing something. The problem is, I would expect the camera crew to follow the cast members quite closely in such shows so I find it hard to imagine being unable to see a group of people gathered on the streets with camera and sound equipment. As such, that got me a bit bothered and wondered if it was an orchestrated move to emphasize the importance of fate and chance in life.
One other thing is the tendency for cast members to be mostly in their 20s and a large number of them being public figures such as actors, models and influencers. While I get it that having young and attractive people appear in such shows is a huge draw for some viewers, I don't really feel or identify with the emotional states of such younger people as relative to my age. And the occupations of these cast members also cast doubt on their intentions by joining these shows - is it for the exposure or are they really in it to find romance? Since they are so attractive in terms of looks, you also can't help but wonder if they need a dating show like this to find romance. And after the show, how many of them indeed continue to date or are they matched up just for the sake of the show? Especially when you consider many to be young actors/actresses, announcing publicly that they are dating someone is probably not what their agencies would want them to do.
As such, I find that these nagging thoughts often affect how immersive and engaging such shows can be for the viewers. That is why I also realised that I gradually didn't care about the pairings anymore and focused more on the process and the peripherals like the scenery when watching such shows. Reality shows no longer grounded in reality can be somewhat of a turnoff, at least to me. However, it's also important to remember that such reality shows are heavily edited and the narrative often skewed to a certain extent so we don't get the full picture about the cast members as well. While I would say that the general flow of this show didn't differ too much from other formats of the same genre, the unique settings and scenery alone should be worth checking out.
