‘Pop the Balloon’ Was a Viral Hit for Black Daters. Then Netflix Gentrified It

While the original has been called out for portraying a surface-level representation of Black dating culture, those unique elements are also what many fans have come to appreciate about it.

Netflix announced that it was taking the series “to the next level” in a new live format and likely has a much bigger budget than the original, but so far it hasn’t gone over well.

The series premiere kicked off with a young white woman unironically rapping about being an honors student within the first 10 minutes. Veteran reality TV star Johnny Bananas, 42, from MTV’s The Challenge, was the first lucky suitor but soured on the women right away. In one exchange, which initially seemed to be directed at a Black contestant, he said that her feet looked like she “sleeps from a tree upside down.” The next day he attempted to clear up his statement on X, writing: “Hey morons, I was actually talking about the WHITE girl whose toes were hanging over her shoes who is literally dressed like a fucking tree!”

The live version is being produced by Sharp Entertainment, the company behind 90 Day Fiancé and Love After Lockup. “This new iteration builds on the original’s core concept while pushing the boundaries of connection, chemistry, and unpredictability,” executive producer Matt Sharp said in a statement.

Exactly what Sharp means by “pushing boundaries” isn’t entirely clear given the heft of Netflix’s influence and the impact the company has had in remaking the future of Hollywood. A more palatable version of Pop the Balloon isn’t necessarily a better one. In fact, Netflix is one of the few streamers, maybe the only streamer, that can take a genuine shot on culturally niche projects because of how much reach and brand awareness the company has.

“I don’t understand why they adapted it, and I don’t really get why it would be a smart play for them. What audience is it going to serve?” a former development lead at Paramount, who also wanted to remain unnamed, tells WIRED. “It really feels like less of a creative evolution and more of a reactionary attempt to fill the gap in live content. I wouldn’t be surprised if a white senior executive at Netflix saw this and assumed Black audiences would rally around it or that they could get white audiences and other audiences to care about it.”

Everyone’s chasing the next breakout format, and the instinct to capitalize on a viral hit is not a wrong one—that’s just smart business—but maybe what gets lost in that pursuit, as a product moves from a user-generated platform to one without full creative control, is the secret sauce that originally made the show a success.

Sharp Entertainment did not respond to a request for comment.

Even with Netflix’s most recent push into live programming—which is very much a work in progress; critic Phillip Maciak called Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney an “ambitious mess”—you can’t help but wonder if what real boundary pushing looks like is a Pop the Balloon not all that different from the original.

Ultimately the failure of the show is a problem of translation, says Stephane Dunn, chair of the Cinema, Television, and Emerging Media Studies Department at Morehouse College. “The original mission of the creator is not always the concern of the streaming platform,” she says. Dunn worries that as streaming platforms have become more “content hungry,” they have discarded cultural specificity, the magic that made a show like Pop the Balloon a hit in the first place, for hollow metrics. (For now, new episodes of Amuli’s original Pop the Balloon are still being posted to YouTube every Wednesday.)

“A lot of these streamers just see numbers. They go, ‘We need to confiscate that. We get that on our platform.’ But they’re not paying attention to what makes the show unique,” Dunn says. “Netflix believed they could duplicate that authenticity, but without certain makers—tone, aesthetics, a relationship to the audience—they have really just purchased a cultural skeleton of the thing.”