First came “The Bachelor”, and it was good, but true love can only go so far in the network television arena. Next came “Joe Millionaire”, putting a twist on the dating show genre by faking out hopeful romantics. The twists and turns have continued, with programs like “Average Joe” and the unfathomable “Littlest Groom”. For the gay viewer, “Boy Meets Boy” gave us a homo twist with a few straight guys thrown in the mix – some people reacted saying it was a cruel trick to play on the hopeful romantic James.

Now comes “Playing it Straight”, and leave it to Fox to turn the dating-show genre into a real game. The program puts Jackie, a single college student from Appleton, Wisconsin, on a dude ranch with 14 guys who vie for her interests and, in some cases, a million dollar prize. Unlike “Boy Meets Boy”, the gay twist on “Playing it Straight” is revealed to Jackie in the first five minutes of the show – and after the shock and dismay wears off, it’s game on for Jackie.

In addition to looking for a possible partner, a million dollars is on the line. If Jackie ends up with a straight guy at the end of the show they split $1 million, but if her choice happens to be gay he gets all the money for himself.

The concept for “Playing it Straight” was developed by Executive Producer Ciara Byrne who said, in a recent phone interview with the Gay & Lesbian Times, “It’s very simple. A lot of girls fancy gay men without even realizing it. So the guy that we think is perfect in every way, gorgeous looking, nicest guy in the entire world, can talk about shopping –and then you discover he’s gay.”

Byrne adds that she has, on more than one occasion, fallen for a gay guy.

“I lived just north of Dupont Circle, which is a gay neighborhood in D.C., and I lived not far from Greenwich Village in New York, so I had a lot of problems. [My gaydar] wasn’t that good, but I think after doing the show it’s gotten somewhat better.”

Byrne pitched the idea for the program to Fox executives on Valentines Day, 2003, and Byrne says they immediately saw the potential, buying it on the spot.

Daphne Brogdon, a stand up comedienne who has hosted “The X Show” on FX and “Perfect Partners” on the Discovery Channel, was selected to host the show.

“They interviewed me and just said, it’s ‘The Bachelorette’ on a dude ranch with a twist,” Brogdon said in a recent phone interview, adding that she did not know ahead of time what the twist was. “I basically said, ‘I’m fine if no one’s getting physically hurt and everyone’s offering themselves up’ – like everybody is, we’re all big whores.”

Brogdon added that it wasn’t until she had been flown to the show’s set, a dude ranch in Nevada, that she was told about the big gay twist.

“I think I kind of thought, ‘Oh my God, terrific idea’ and it’s so simple and elegant I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before,” Brogdon said about the premise. “Leave it to a British producer to come up with it because it seems like that kind of cheeky humor that Brits would come up with, and I think the issue of homosexuality is not such a big deal over there as it is in puritanical America.”

Brogdon said she believes “Playing it Straight” is quite different from “Boy Meets Boy”, which aired the summer “Playing it Straight” was filmed. Brogdon said that she tuned into the program out of curiosity.

“I think when it came down to the big finale it was kind of a thud,” Brogdon said of “Boy Meets Boy. “It was kind of like ‘That’s it?’ – I wanted to see the emotional thing of him saying to the guy, ‘Look, I’ve been lying to you the whole time.’ And I just didn’t get that screechy fag hag, his friend. I was just like, ‘What is she doing there?’ And I think they must have put her in there because they didn’t trust the hero of it, the main guy.”

One of the key elements of casting “Playing it Straight” was finding 14 men who didn’t fit stereotypes.

“When we were casting we looked for a mix of guys,” Byrne said. “We looked for gay men who didn’t fit the stereotype. We looked for straight men who didn’t fit the straight stereotype, and then we looked for some in the middle so we would completely confuse the girl.”

Similarly, finding a small-town girl was important to the show.

“Jackie is not Kim Cattrell of “Sex in the City”,” Brogdon said. “She’s a very young, innocent girl from Wisconsin who’s had very little exposure to gay guys.”

“That was carefully planned,” says Byrne. “We didn’t want her gaydar to be too good. Jackie has gay friends, but she hasn’t lived in the big city so she isn’t as steeped in gay culture, so we figured that would be to our advantage. She’s great – on the one hand, she hasn’t had huge experiences of the world because she’s young and she lives in a small town. On the other hand she is very open minded and up for an adventure.”

The show’s producers are hoping that “Playing it Straight” will let people look past someone’s sexual orientation and see the person underneath.

“You don’t know which guys are gay and which guys are straight so you fall in love with these characters and you start rooting for these characters not knowing whether they are gay or straight,” Byrne explained. “I think it’s going to surprise a lot of middle America that this guy does all of these different things that seem very straight and yet he’s gay, so I think that’s great. We’re lifting away their sexual preferences, we’re taking that away as their identity and we’re kind of giving everybody blank slates to start with, and I think America’s going to really enjoy it.”

Brogdon also said that she found herself sympathizing with the male contestants on the show, pointing out that even though Jackie was playing the game and had a lot at stake, she also had the power in the game to decide who would stay and who would go home.

“I definitely felt some empathy for the gay guys because I thought this must be very painful for them,” Brogdon said. “Of course, once they were off [the show] they told me it was very painful for them. The gay guys knew what was going on when they went into it, and there was a chance to win a million dollars so that’s an element, but a lot of them did it because they wanted to break stereotypes and make statements. But I think some of them will say that they thought it was much harder than they thought it was going to be.”

Similarly, Byrne said that the process was also rough on the straight guys competing for Jackie’s affections. “You think it was difficult for the gay guys, it was really difficult for the straight guys. They were trying to prove that they were something that they already were. They were a lot more frustrated. For the gay guys it was difficult for them because they had to figure out, how do you play it straight as such, how do you flirt with a girl, and all those things that [involves] being something you’re not for 24 hours a day. For the straight guys, the frustrations that came out of them was that they were so upset that Jackie would say, ‘I think you’re gay’, so they also found it extremely difficult.”

In the end, the program comes down to playing people against stereotypes, and Byrne says that her experiences working with the gay members of the cast has had a profound effect on her.

“One of the most enriching parts of it was that we got to meet so many gay men and we talked about being gay in America and they didn’t know what the show was or anything,” Byrne said. “But a lot of them told us their stories of how it was to be gay in America and how it was to come out, and on numerous occasions I ended up crying just because there is still a lot of pain in being gay in America today because of people’s close mindedness.”

“Playing it Straight” premiers on Friday, March 12, at 8:00 p.m. on Fox.