New British Dating Show Shocks Internet With Dramatic Elimination

New dating shows following a similar blueprint seem to pop up every season. While the U.S. has produced many of their own, American audiences have become drawn to shows produced across the pond.

One of the newest shows on the roster is The Love Trap, which premiered on Channel 4 in the U.K. on October 20. According to a press release announcing the show back in July, the show "ingeniously subverts familiar dating show tropes in order to explore just how good we all are at spotting a genuine connection."

Like many shows of the genre, The Love Trap takes place in a mansion. Throughout the series, 12 women will try to "win the affection" of the bachelor. The twist? Not all of the women are single, so it is up to the bachelor to discern who is truly looking for love and who is looking for a paycheck.

"Successfully enticing our single man means they also avoid the elimination at the end of each episode when one suspected love trap will be dumped, quite literally, through the trap door," the press release said.

That's right. A trap door. A clip that has been circulating the internet showed what appears to be an elimination round where the bachelor, David, has to choose who he thinks is The Love Trap—the person who is secretly in a relationship.

Once he says the name, a trap door appears under one of the women and she drops through the ground. The faces of the two other contestants and the bachelor himself say it all.

Twitter user @Brocklesnitch posted the clip, which has now been retweeted thousands of times and has been flooded with memes and jokes.

"How is this not an SNL sketch?!," one user commented.

One user posted a GIF of the moment Veruca Salt falls through the trap door in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Another user posted that the show was similar to a game show that premiered in the U.S. during the early 2000s where contestants would similarly fall through a trap door.

The bachelor, who might look familiar to some reality dating show fans, was also featured on Netflix's Too Hot to Handle. The Netflix show and The Love Trap share executive producers.

In May 2020, Parade reported that according to data from PeerLogix, viewership for dating shows during the pandemic had gone up—along with TV viewership in general. The company analyzed 20 dating shows that were at the time airing or streaming and found that viewership in the U.S. was 23 percent higher in May than it was in December—a trend that was rare for the genre.

Newsweek reached out to Channel 4 for comment.