Blind Date revival leads Disney+ UK charge into reality and formats

A Blind Date reboot and a pair of docuseries following The Rooneys and Made in Chelsea’s Jamie Laing and Sophie Habboo will lead Disney+ UK’s move into the reality and formats spaces, as the streamer adds former Shine TV boss Jon Swain to its unscripted commissioning team, Broadcast can reveal.

Swain, who joins Sean Doyle’s UK & EMEA team, will exec produce on The Rooneys (w/t), a 10 x 40-minute ob doc from Lorton Entertainment and Blast Films, following the iconic couple as Coleen navigates a blossoming entrepreneurial career and Wayne takes charge of the school runs.

The series follows on from Dorothy St Pictures and Lorton’s hit doc Coleen: The Real Wagatha Story, which Doyle told Broadcast was a “game-changer” for Disney+ UK’s unscripted unit.

It marks the first Disney+ project to be exec produced by Swain since he joined EMEA unscripted chief Doyle’s team as a commissioning executive last month. Swain previously headed Shine TV for three years – including exec producing the Banijay label’s hit Disney+ original Finding Michael – before stepping down to spend more time with his family in late 2023.

His move to Disney reunites him with Doyle and fellow unscripted commissioner Gaby Aung.

Swain will exec produce The Rooneys alongside Julian Bird and Paul Stretford for Lorton and Danny Horan and Tanya Winston for Blast. Martin Webb serves as series director, while Nonuk Walter is the showrunner.

Produced by Who Wants To Be A Millionaire outfit Stellify Media, the 10 x 45-minute Blind Date has been updated for modern audiences and is “Blind Date like you’ve never seen before” with innovative twists to the well-known format, according to Doyle.

Blind Date’s formula sees contestants choosing between three potential suitors, hidden from their view by a wall. One of the updates in the Disney+ reboot is that the daters will spend a summer living together, but with potential new partners always lurking behind the wall.

Doyle told Broadcast the show is a “brilliant first step” for the streamer into the dating space.

“It’s such a well-known brand in terms of the title, but it’s definitely time where we can be innovative with the format and with the casting,” he explained. “Dating shows have always been great for casting, but with Blind Date, I think we’re going to want people to really stay with the series over the 10 episodes.

“We’re going to work really hard on that and we are already working hard on the casting because they carry the show and always did, even when it was in the studio.”

Though the blind daters will be spending the summer together, the format will not be following in the steps of risqué formats Too Hot to Handle (Netflix) or Love Island (ITV2), with Doyle noting that “salacious” likely wouldn’t work well for Disney+ subscribers.

Cilla Black famously hosted ITV’s long-running edition of Blind Date from 1985 to 2003, with Paul O’Grady taking over to present Channel 5’s 2017 revival, which Doyle oversaw during his time as a commissioning editor at the PSB.

No figure is attached to host Disney+’ iteration of the show just yet, but Doyle promised that the new innovations to the format “will let them get their teeth into it and make it their own”.

Blind Date is exec produced by Matt Worthy and Kieran Doherty for Sony Pictures Television’s Stellify and Graham Stuart for ITV Studios-backed So TV.

While he hadn’t initially been looking to commission a dating format, the idea was born out of a pitch conversation with Stellify’s Worthy, discussing the SVoD’s Northern Ireland development fund, though Doyle said this did not emerge from that scheme.

The film selected from that development initiative is being kept under wraps as Doyle and his team and NI Screen try to move it to a formal greenlight.

Dorothy St and Laing and Habboo’s outfit Jampot Productions have teamed up to produce 6 x 30-minute series Jamie and Sophie: Raising Chelsea (w/t) as the husband and wife embrace parenthood and the ups and downs that come with it.

Laing and Habboo will exec produce as well as Aung, senior manager of unscripted at Disney+. Brent Gundesen is directing.

Doyle commissioned all three series for Disney+ UK.

Hyper-local leads the way

While Laing and Habboo aren’t as well-known globally as others who have fronted docs for Disney+ Uk, such as Dua Lipa and Keanu Reeves, they fit right into Doyle’s wish-list of “hyper-local, successful names” though he emphasised he wants projects that are driven by story rather than talent.

“For me it’s more about the story as opposed to who the talent is,” he said, noting that Wayne Rooney was better known globally than Coleen, though her story is what resonated with Disney+ viewers.

Though Doyle’s team is now moving into reality and formats, it is still on the lookout for limited series and single docs that he says are “foundational” to his strategy for female-skewing projects.

He added he has ambitions to commission more male-targeted programmes in the future.

“The next thing for us is moving into this reality space and this female-skewing ob docs with these commissions. The dream is that we continue to do more in that space and then also bring in more male-skewing pieces in that sports doc space,” he explained.

The three projects speak to Doyle’s broader ambitions for his output, noting that Disney+ Italia took Italy’s Got Talent to the platform, while there’s “a concentrated effort” for formats and reality in Benelux and the Netherlands.

Ultimately, he wants returners in these spaces that can complement the streamer’s premium boxset docs and films.

He said: “This is a slate that gives us a real sense of scale in terms the order size. That female-skewing audience that we pioneered bringing into the streaming market in the UK, that’s who we want to continue coming to Disney+. They’re already there, we want to keep giving them more.”