If MTV don’t bring back Room Raiders I will burn this city to the ground

There are a lot of things I miss about the early to mid 00s. The ability to wear dresses over jeans, for example. The musical stylings of Fall Out Boy. The ability to enjoy day to day life without experiencing an ever encroaching crushing emotional emptiness (just millennial adult things, I guess). Oh, and Room Raiders.

Room Raiders, an avante garde, completely ahead of its time reality show, was indisputably the best thing about the 00s. For the uninitiated, the show (which tragically only ran from 2004 to 2006 although a Lithuanian version did debut in 2010) was like a kind of twisted blind date, where a guy or girl raids the room of three potential lovers. While this is happening they’re abducted from their homes and stuck in the back of an MTV van, watching some stranger blacklight their duvet and giggling. I honestly believe it was the primitive inspiration for the film Taken.

Even Zac Efron appeared on it. That’s how iconic it was. Here he is in action back in 2005, at the sweet young age of 2017, giving three teenage girls an aneurysm as he scrutinises their bedrooms so they might get to go on a date with him.

In 2017, where we have reverse image search and Instagram tagged photos and the ability to make a second fake Facebook profile just to stalk someone, I guess admittedly Room Raiders is sadly redundant. But that’s a real shame. We’ve become so reliant on technology that yeah, we might be able to see that the person we’re dating has glo’d the fuck up since their holiday to Corfu in 2009, but we cannot root through their possessions while they’re locked in a van, literally using a blacklight to see how much they masturbate. Real shame.

The true predictive power of Room Raiders was allowing people to choose who they’re gonna date without ever seeing or speaking to them, which is basically how everyone who’s ever used a dating app meets people anyway. However, sadly we’ve all become too wise to the game to ever enjoy the tension that Room Raiders gave us. We all know how to curate our identity on Tinder or whatever, but you never truly know someone until you’ve poked at their retainer on national TV, do you?

There’s only one way to bring back true realness and romance to the dating game in 2017. Let us go back to rooting through the treasured things of people we’ve never met on national TV. Give us something to enjoy. Give us back Room Raiders.

Oh and we also want MADE.