• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

It has been 20 years since TLC’s first successful reality-dwarf series, “Little People, Big World,” premiered in 2006.

And now, two decades later, TLC is still at it with its latest series on the lives of little people, “Little Singles.”

Premiering last month, the show has randy dwarves pairing up and tripling up as they live a “life without limits,” says a TLC press release. 

The five stars of “Little Singles” -- two men and three women -- range in age from 26 to 37. 

Their last names and hometowns are not mentioned in TLC’s announcement, which is unusual for a reality series of this type.

On the show, the five are all living in the same house -- the same device used on so many other TV shows from "The Real World" and "The Surreal Life" to "Big Brother" and "The Bachelor."

In this shared residence, "friendships deepen and sparks fly," says TLC. This kind of drama is also a staple of reality TV, and for all of them, the sole reason people watch them.

Nevertheless, TLC positions “Little Singles” as a "relationship series that follows a vibrant, tight-knit group of little people for a rare opportunity to date, connect and build community."

The characters are each described by TLC in ways that are familiar to devotees of this category of reality shows.

John, 28, "is the heart and glue of the house." Sammy, 26, the other male in the house, is “a loud and magnetic presence.”

Of the women, Stephanie, 32, “is looking for something real,” while Krista, 30, is "the charismatic 'princess' of the group" and JJ, 37, is "a bold and lifelong performer."

In short, “Little Singles” is a lot like many other such shows, only with dwarves.

It continues TLC’s long fascination with dwarves that started with “Little People, Big World” and subsequently continued with shows such as “The Little Couple,” and the dwarf-family show “7 Little Johnstons.”

Those three shows were always positioned positively by TLC and little-people advocacy groups because they depicted little people leading the same kinds of lives as average-sized people, only the little people faced different challenges. 

Whether or not little people and the advocacy groups will warm up to “Little Singles” is not for the TV Blog to say.

But the little-people community did object to a show about dwarf wrestlers, “Big Little Brawlers,” that premiered in 2024 on Discovery Channel.

The leading little-people advocacy group, Little People of America (LPA), felt that the show advanced enduring stereotypes of little people as sideshow attractions.

Before “Little People, Big World” came on the scene, two other shows featured dwarves on Fox.

One of them was “The Littlest Groom,” which aired as a two-part special in 2004. On the show, little person Glen Foster, 23, went in search of love among a group of 12 women, who were also little people.

Wikipedia says the show was greeted negatively by critics, but the then-president of LPA, Matt Roloff -- patriarch of the “Little People, Big World” family -- came out in favor of it.

More notorious, but largely forgotten was a segment on one of the nuttiest reality TV shows ever produced, “Man vs. Beast” (2003), also on Fox.

In the segment, a group of 44 dwarves competed with an Asian Elephant to see which could pull a DC-10 jet the fastest over a preset distance. The elephant won.