Speed Dating

Would you like to have a month's worth of dates in one night? Want to shop for a potential mate but hate all the leg work? Need a service that can help you find your true love without dealing with the Mailer Daemons and other inconveniences of online dating? The 21st century's answer to all these problems is speed dating.

Designed by Rabbi Yaacov Deyo in 1998 as a way to help Jewish singles meet each other, speed dating is now a common practice enjoyed by people of different religions, ages, sexual orientations, etc. The rules may vary by event, but the general idea is that men and women sign up for the event, held in a bar or a club, the men move down the line of women (or from table and table), and you have a limited amount of time (say 1, 3, or 5 minutes) to figure out if the person is worth getting to know better before time runs out and it's time to switch. Participants don't personally exchange or solicit any contact information; you turn a list of names/id numbers into the organizer, and if there's a mutual attraction, they'll connect you.

The obvious advantages of speed dating in Real Life are that it provides a way to meet a lot of people in a short amount of time, eliminates pressure to ask for phone numbers, and doesn't allow much time for things to turn awkward. It has a lot of potential in fiction, too: it can serve as a great hunting ground for the perp in an episode of a detective drama, or it allows you to show a fun Montage of the main character(s) meeting lots of weird and/or annoying people, like a personal Terrible Interviewees Montage sequence, or it can provide An Aesop about first impressions. Using the last one is probably not the best idea because one of the reasons speed dating makes a lot of scientific sense is that we actually do decide whether or not we're attracted to someone very quickly, some studies say within the first thirty seconds. Yes, love is, quite literally, a crapshoot. If there are No Sparks now, there won't be later, or so it would seem.

In any case, speed dating can be a lot fun in fiction and reality.

Film

 * Shows up in The 40-Year-Old Virgin where the guys sign up to help Andy find an easy date. Hilarity Ensues.

Live Action TV
""Well, you know what they say, Frank..." *sunglasses* "...speed kills." YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
 * Law and Order SVU: A serial rapist played by Dean Cain used speed dating to hunt for victims. SVU put the pattern together after three victims and sent Olivia undercover. Her last date before the perp was with a guy who collected Pez dispensers.
 * NCIS: A murder victim recently attended a speed dating event, so the team sends Ziva undercover in case she met her killer there and he shows up for the second night. The catch is that they decide Ziva ought to assume the personality of the victim to try to attract the same man... and the victim was a big computer nerd.
 * House: Wilson learns that every woman in the world knows someone who died of cancer, House Sherlock Scans a woman who Sherlock Scanned him, and Chase tries as hard as he can to turn women off and fails.
 * Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide: Moze arranges this for Ned after Suzie moves away. Tip for girls: Telling a guy you only shower once a month is not attractive.
 * Psych, in the episode "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, He Loves Me, Oops He's Dead"
 * Monk: Monk went to a speed-dating event to get a chance to talk to a suspect, and in the meantime was awkward and uncomfortable with all the other women he had to talk to first.
 * In Ashes to Ashes, Drake uses speed dating as part of a plan to catch a criminal targeting women through a dating agency. Of course, this was 1983.
 * In an episode of Charmed, Piper held a speed dating event at P3 and got Paige to go there to boost the beautiful women quota.
 * This troper is aware of an episode of CSI: Miami where a speed dater's death kicked off the plot; in the Cold Open, Caine quips accordingly:


 * In one episode of The Vicar of Dibley, Geraldine tries speed-dating. Her prospective partners turn out to comprise all the regular characters. Including the Happily Married Alice and Hugo. Together.
 * iCarly had the episode iSpeedDate

Web Comics

 * Alien Loves Predator frequently features Abe's adventures in speed dating. Given that Abe is a Lovable Sex Maniac with No Social Skills—not to mention a Xenomorph—it goes... Poorly.

Web Original

 * The basic premise behind the web series Speedie Date

Western Animation

 * Totally Spies: Clover once tried out "hyper-sonic dating," which was identical to speed dating except you get to arrange to date anyone you like at the first event for a whole minute to get to know them better.
 * Sixteen had this in an episode where Jonesy sets up a Speed Dating service and the gang attempts it