Samantha Allen is the author of Puck, out this week from Zando. Below, she discusses what keeps bringing her back to writing fiction about reality TV.

After I wrote Patricia Wants to Cuddle, a horror novel about a Sasquatch attacking the cast and crew of a fictionalized Bachelor-style dating competition, I thought I’d never go back to the reality TV well again. I’ve always wanted to be a moving target as an author, hopping from genre to genre and theme to theme. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what the shows we watch say about modern life.

In the time since my fiction debut, shows like Love Is Blind and The Ultimatum supplanted The Bachelor in our cultural consciousness, replacing the simple game-show formats of yesteryear with formats that force “everyday” people into arcane systems with rules and literal walls and forced partner swaps.

• It seems as though, in our increasingly alienated and disconnected age, many people are intrigued by the idea of arbitrary romantic constraints: What if all we had to judge a potential partner by was their voice? What if more of us tried arranged marriage?

But of course, there’s a difference between fantasizing about our choices being narrowed and actually having them narrowed for us. That’s why Love Is Blind, despite presenting itself as a refreshing alternative to unserious modern dating, has such an abysmal success rate: At the end of the day, most people would rather take their chances swiping and praying than pick their spouse through an intercom.

• That tension between what we yearn for and what we actually desire made me break my rule against double-dipping.

Puck, my new queer Shakespeare retelling out from Zando this week, is about a 30-year-old nonbinary reality TV producer who decides their friends aren’t marrying the right people and takes it upon themself to fix it. In fact, if you think about it, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was kind of the original reality show, following a group of hapless lovers being watched over—and toyed with—by powerful fairies.

Both the play and my reimagining explore the same ideas as the current Netflix chart-toppers: Would it secretly be kind of nice for a tinkering mischief maker to fix us up? Or does the heart still want what it wants?