PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK

Before eHarmony, and Match, and Tinder, and Bumble, and Hinge … there was “Date Night TV.”

The show, which began airing on WPXI (after “Saturday Night Live”) in 1995, was kind of the first wave of reality television, with bar-hopping hosts stopping by hot spots (Tequila Willies, Banana Joe’s, Chauncy’s) to film Pittsburgh singles looking for love. Each single featured on the episode would have a unique mailbox number, and viewers could call a number into the station (men had to pay .49 cents a minute, women could call for free), and connect.

Host Lisa Dapprich stumbled into the job. At the time, she was a hairstylist, working with some of the executives at WPXI. Originally, the idea was to have singles come into the studio — and Dapprich agreed to do their hair and makeup. She started to hang around while the show taped, and eventually (after the original producer left), stepped into a production role. And then she decided to change the format.

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“We originally did a little segment called The Burning Question, which was like man-on-the-street,” Dapprich says. “We’d go to bars, and we had rock comic Mark Eddie playing guitar and asking these goofy questions, and we’d have people answer it and edit all together. It was the best part of the show! And I knew that’s what the show needed to be.”

And the network let it happen.

Dapprich and her crew (other hosts included John Cline from the radio station B94) would go to bars and talk to people as they were out partying. Everyone who participated had to sign a release, but Dapprich says there was never any trouble finding people who wanted to be on TV.

“I found that if we started interviewing around 11 p.m., people had a couple of drinks and they would loosen up,” she says. “They were fun. If we went anywhere past 12:30, 1 a.m., they were annihilated and we couldn’t use anything.”

The show (you can still find some episodes on YouTube) was wild. People shared their real names, their real jobs (“I’m a personal financial advisor with American Express”), and their real sexual exploits.

“I remember asking one guy, where was the most unusual place you had a romantic encounter,” she says. “And he said something like, beside his grandmother’s bed, with his grandmother in the bed. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s something that will stick with you.’”

Thanks to the signed releases, the station never got sued, but there were some morning-after regrets.

“If someone called me at the station within that week before we started editing and said, ‘You gotta pull me,’ I would have,” Dapprich says. “I didn’t want to ruin anybody’s life.”

“Joe Manganiello was on it,” she adds. “I interviewed him and he said that he was on his way out to L.A. shortly. I’ll never forget it because he was so hot, No. 1, and because he was funny. And he popped up a couple of years later, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. He made it. I  interviewed him in the Strip District, and he made it. Maybe he was using it as his tape. That’s what got him to the big leagues.’”

Officially, “Date Night TV” stopped airing in 2002, but new episodes had stopped filming a few years earlier.

“I did it for about five years, and then I was just done with it,” Dapprich says. “I thought they’d get somebody else to do it, but they just ended up putting reruns [on the air] and still getting good numbers. Once I quit and they put it onto reruns for a few years, these poor people were like, ‘Get me off of this show!’ You know, their 3-year-old child is sitting there, and here they are dropping it at a bar somewhere, talking about their favorite turn on, and that was years ago.

“It was fun while it was fun, and then I just couldn’t take drunk people anymore.”