Amelia Dimoldenberg has made a career out of going on awkward dates. She’s gone out with nearly 100 celebrities and has never started a relationship with any of them.
“Chicken Shop Date” — Dimoldenberg’s YouTube-exclusive show — just celebrated its 10th anniversary. The concept is wildly fresh: Dimoldenberg and a celebrity guest share a table in a fast food restaurant, eating chicken and chips — fries, for us Americans — while on a “date.” Due to Dimoldenberg’s deadpan, never-quite-in-earnest energy, the show is part interview, part first date and part comedy skit.
The show began in 2014 when Dimoldenberg was an undergrad at Central Saint Martins in London. She started making the videos with friends, reaching out to anyone she could think of who might come on the show — mostly British rap artists at the start. “Chicken Shop Date” has continued to be a passion project for Dimoldenberg and one she wants complete creative control over even now. She told “Talk Easy” podcast host Sam Fragoso that the revenue the show generates is entirely from YouTube-generated ads because of this.
“I don’t do any sponsors,” Dimoldenberg said. “I’m really averse to anyone being involved apart from me. I don’t want a brand to have any say in it.”
Dimoldenberg’s emphasis on keeping the show hers alone has served “Chicken Shop Date” well — as her unique brand of cutting, quick humor is the axis on which the whole show turns. The playful quirkiness of the show is accentuated by the way it is edited: snippets of conversation are interspersed with cuts of the chicken shop, drinks in a fridge and strange, Wes-Anderson-type shots of the expressionless restaurant staff staring down the lens. Although each episode is set in a different restaurant with its own individual aesthetic, the show trends toward harsh lighting and the sort of color combinations that benefit a fast-food restaurant more than a Hollywood interview: lots of browns, oranges and reds. The shops and their chicken-themed decor serve as a neutral, blank canvas for the interviews and serve to add to the comedic blandness that is a part of the “Chicken Shop” brand — think “Napoleon Dynamite.”
Dimoldenberg also delights in peppering her dates with strange and even preposterous questions. She asked musician Phoebe Bridgers, who frequently wears a skeleton onesie on stage, whether she thought dressing as a skeleton is “promoting an unhealthy body image.” She asked “Hot Ones” host Sean Evans what it is like to be bald. In an interaction that’s been repeatedly made into sound bytes, she suddenly asked musician Jack Harlow, “Can you read?”
He can, allegedly.
The unorthodox interview setting lends itself to character-revealing moments that are harder to come by in more traditional talk show settings. Dimoldenberg’s guests are not plugging new projects or vulnerably waxing poetic — they are on an awkward first date, and most react accordingly. The tone of every episode of “Chicken Shop Date” is unique: some interviewees flirt with Dimoldenberg, some are standoffish and some are able to match her wit and dry humor.
This may be the only catch to the “Chicken Shop Date” — you are never quite sure how real any of it is. Is Dimoldenberg really trying to find love through the show? Is she viewing the interviews as real dates? Are her guests? Are they actually flirting or is this just good content? Is it actually awkward or is this just good content? The show isn’t quite sure either, and as the balance is constantly shifting, so does the show’s dynamic, staying fresh every episode.
For some of the interviews, like when Dimoldenberg asks Jennifer Lawrence about her real-life husband, Cooke Maroney, you’re pretty sure the “date” part of the show is just for fun. But for other episodes — like when Jack Harlow stares into her eyes, grins, and tells her he’d be willing to move to London for a girl — you cannot be so sure anymore.
Nowhere is this delicate dance between interview and date so obvious as in the most recent episode of “Chicken Shop Date,” featuring Andrew Garfield. This episode has been highly anticipated, due to a series of charged interactions between the two at various red carpets over the last two years.
Garfield — who is deeply earnest in every interview or podcast episode he graces — refuses to allow Dimoldenberg to stay in her typical “Chicken Shop” character. He demands authenticity from her, pointing out every time she slips into acting rather than meeting him with the same amount of sincerity he brings to the conversation.
“I’m going to be myself,” he says at the beginning of the interview. When later Dimoldenberg says she thinks they have potential as a couple, Garfield doesn’t allow her the indefiniteness that such a comment usually carries on “Chicken Shop Date.” He immediately asks for clarification.
“Do you actually think that or is this just for the…” Garfield trails off, glancing at the cameras around them.
Garfield’s earnestness is so contagious that Dimoldenberg can’t manage to stay in character for longer than a few seconds, constantly breaking her standard, non-smiling date persona to laugh and blush with him.
This is a clear deviation from the traditional tone of a “Chicken Shop Date.” Although the episode is similar to the other “dates” — no music, quick cutting and awkward pauses — the whole feel is dramatically different because of Dimoldenberg and Garfield’s dynamic. Instead of comedic, it’s charming. This reveals how much the show depends on Dimoldenberg and her charisma: when she’s awkward, the show is funny; when she’s genuine, the show is sweet. She plays to her guests, responding to what they bring to the table, whether feigned rudeness, flirtatiousness or even disinterest — and the whole vibe of the show shifts accordingly.
This is the greatest strength of “Chicken Shop Date.” The show brings out new sides of a celebrity rather than the image the public might be used to seeing. Dimoldenberg comments on this in her appearance on “Hot Ones.”
“It’s my favorite thing to show a different side of a person,” Dimoldenberg says.
Later in the same interview, she takes a step back from her interviewing persona to reflect on why it is so effective: it disarms guests and makes them laugh.
“After the first joke, I feel like people kind of become at ease,” Dimoldenberg says.
