Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love Undercover’ on Peacock, a Dating Show That Takes Famous International Soccer Stars and Strips Them of Their Fame To Date American Women

When you’re a rich and famous athlete, it can be hard to find someone who loves you for you. That is, unless they don’t know who you are. Love Undercover, a new dating/reality series on Peacock, takes five wildly successful international soccer players and brings them to Los Angeles, where the women they’ll be dating don’t have any idea that they’re not just average Joes.

LOVE UNDERCOVER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The show opens with a lengthy montage of soccer highlights interspersed with clips from the season to come, clips that mostly consist of dating show cliches and the unsuspecting women wondering if they can actually date a construction worker or whatever else these rich and famous athletes are pretending to be. It’s a substantial montage, so much that I started to wonder when the show was actually going to start, or if it was going to. The point is–unlike the stars–they’re putting all their cards on the table up front.

The Gist: Right off the bat in the pilot, we’re introduced to the five stars–Premier League players Jamie O’Hara, Ryan Babel and Lloyd Jones, plus Mexican stars Marco Fabián and Sebastián Fassi. They’re shuttled to a penthouse in Los Angeles, and the women they’ll be dating are introduced to them through pictures alone. This is their first trial; they don’t even get to turn on their charm, instead getting humbled as the women pick who they want to date.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It bears more than a passing resemblance to other dating-show-with-a-twist programs like Love Is Blind or Joe Millionaire or whatever, but the real answer here is Lust Conquers All, the fictional dating show that featured as a subplot on S2 of Ted Lasso. If Jamie Tartt were a real person, he would absolutely be on Love Undercover.

Our Take: It’s always been fascinating to me how someone can be wildly famous in one part of the world, and virtually anonymous in another. Shortly after Argentine soccer superstar Lionel Messi moved from powerhouse Paris St-Germain to Inter Miami, he was spotted casually shopping at a Florida supermarket, something that would’ve seen him thronged by mobs of adoring fans in Europe or South America. Heck, I’m an avid sports fan, and outside of a dozen or so top-line stars, I’m not sure I’d recommend most soccer players if they were standing next to me on the street.

That fame gap is the gimmick that underpins Love Undercover, a surprisingly-endearing reality dating show on Peacock. The five men looking for love on this show are, in fact, wealthy and famous, each of them having achieved major success as an international soccer player. They’re just not allowed to tell the women they’re dating that. They’ve been given (mostly boring) cover stories that will force them to turn on the charm without the benefit of their status–but it’ll also hopefully give them a chance to meet someone who isn’t just chasing that status.

The initial round of dates shows how humbling this process can be for the men. Each of their pictures is put on display for the women to choose from, and three of the women choose the handsome Lloyd, an uneven distribution that leaves Jamie and Marco without dates–a situation they clearly haven’t experienced in quite a while.

It’s also–to be perfectly frank–quite funny watching the men squirm as they can’t admit the fame and status they actually have. One woman–a self-described influencer–brags about her 60,000 Instagram followers, and Ryan is forced to pretend like he doesn’t have any followers (he actually has two million).

The structure of the show–gimmick notwithstanding–is pretty standard for a dating show, and will feel very familiar if you’re a fan of the genre. The thing is, though, a dating show lives or dies on the power of its gimmick, and the one underpinning Love Undercover is a pretty darn good one. (Full disclosure: I’m not typically a fan of the genre, and it still sucked me in.)

Sex and Skin: No full nudity, but there’s a heck of a lot of skin on display. I mean, we’re trying to make connections here, right?

Parting Shot: Tinah–who’s mentioned her background in journalism multiple times–asks Jamie if he’s a football fan, and he sweats as she refuses to believe that a British man like him isn’t into the Premier League. “The Premier League that I fucking played in!” Jamie exclaims in his after-the-fact interview. It’s a big question: will these guys be able to keep their secret?

Sleeper Star: Each of the guys is actually a star, at least somewhere, so it feels a little unfair to pick a sleeper. But right off the bat, retired English footballer Jamie O’Hara–the oldest and most talkative of the bunch–steals the show with his profane banter.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Have you seen the movie Mission Impossible?” Sebastian Fassi asks. “Tom Cruise has got it easier than what we’ve got to do. We are going undercover.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you’re into reality dating shows, that is. If you’re not, you’re going to hate it. But if that’s your thing, Love Undercover is a fun and surprisingly funny spin on the genre.

Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter, is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.