Tonight the Lifetime Network (“Entertainment for Women” … and the Gay Men Who Love Them) launches its new game show, Gay, Straight or Taken? The show's lean premise is this: A woman arrives on a dating show where she chooses an ideal mate from three eligible bachelors, with the goal of winning a tropical getaway with her new man. But then the rules change. Once she has met the guys, she is told that one of the men is not single and has a girlfriend, while another is not single and has a boy friend. In order to win the romantic vacation getaway for herself and her date, the woman must choose the straight, unattached contender. If she picks one of the “taken” men, that man and his girlfriend or boyfriend will walk away with the prize.

As a basic game show concept, there's nothing new here. Whether it's yelling at briefcases full of money, answering trivia questions or eating live dung beetles, television game shows have rules (however contrived) and prizes, and here it's no different. These men and this woman are playing to win a vacation, and once the rules are set, it's really just like any other results-based game of deception. Think of it as The Mole with a dash of covert sexuality.

The problem — and it's not a small one — is that this is being sold as a dating show that actually has something to do with “real life,” that being whether or not your dating skills tells you if possible paramours are gay, straight or taken. And yet these people are openly manipulating one another in order to win something; romance has absolutely no place here. In fact, emotional attachment would only get in the way.

The ads for Gay, Straight or Taken claim that “you do it in the gym,” “you do it at the bars,” etc., suggesting that women are constantly having to play Nancy Drew with the men in their lives when it comes to determining their romantic availability. And in some cases that could certainly be true. For a woman who is actively looking for love, the sea of attractive, modern men that laps at her feet can make for some choppy sailing indeed. She may fall for a gay guy, or for a guy who has a girlfriend, or even for a guy who would just rather keep things platonic. Likewise, she could fall for a guy who just wants to hit it and quit it, or a guy who is trying to get over his mommy issues, or a guy who wants to try on her underwear, and so on and so forth.

The dating world is a confusing mess, and no one's really going to argue with that. But the problem with Gay, Straight or Taken is that, when you look at the basic motives in the game play, it bears absolutely no relation to the actual dating world. Take the “secretly gay” guy, for example. While there's always the chance that a woman might fall head over heels for a man who is gay, it's usually easily remedied by asking the question, “Are you gay?” In Gay, Straight or Taken, the men are actually encouraged to lie.

In the real dating world, gay men are not out to actively deceive single women with the express intention of winning a tropical vacation that they can then take with their handsome boyfriends. Sure, if the gay guy were out to get a green card or steal someone's inheritance, then maybe I could see why he might lie to a woman and say that he's straight in order to make her fall for him. But then the show should be called Straight, Taken or Gold-digging Sociopath?

This is where Gay, Straight or Taken misses the mark. In giving the bachelors incentives to lie, they actively encourage them to trick the lovelorn lass into thinking that they're straight and single. They don't even need to be likable, as the woman's main goal now is to try to weed out the gay man and the cheater, not to find the guy she actually likes the most. The aim has shifted significantly from “pick the guy you like” to “pick the guy who isn't lying.” And if the message of the show is that this is where the bar is now set for single women looking for love, then that's about enough to make you put your head in the oven.

On the pilot episode, which was the only one available for review, our blond, perky (but not annoyingly so) heroine thinks she's on a show designed to get her a date, and soon finds out that she's really there to catch these guys in a lie. She's understandably a bit disappointed but is a good sport about it. The guys are all very handsome, fit and perfectly masculine — but then again, any man who goes on this show, straight or gay, is going to act as masculine as possible to avoid any chance that he'll be pegged as gay and therefore eliminated.

The guys also want to seem unattached and emotionally open (so as to seem single), so they're all on their best behavior — again, purely in the hopes of winning the prize. So you've got three hunks acting as masculine and attentive and sincere as you can imagine in the hopes of winning a vacation, and a girl looking for a little love who has to try to crack their veneers. Ah, romance …

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