Dating a blind chick

Love Is Blind
Title card for the series.
Genre	Reality
Presented by
Country of origin	United States
Original language	English
No. of series	1
No. of episodes	11
Production
Executive producers	Chris Coelen Sam Dean Ally Simpson Eric Detwiler Terrance Villarreal
Running time	48–84 minutes
Production company	Kinetic Content
Release
Original network	Netflix
Picture format	16:9
Original release	February 13, 2020 (2020-02-13) – present (present)

Love Is Blind is a datingreality television series, produced by Kinetic Content^[1] and created by Chris Coelen^[2] which premiered on Netflix on February 13, 2020 as part of a three-week event.^[3] The series has been compared to Married at First Sight, which was also produced by Kinetic Content,^[1] and The Bachelor.^[4] A total of ten episodes were released, in addition to a reunion special that was released on Netflix and YouTube on March 5.^[5]

Netflix renewed Love Is Blind for a second and third season on March 24, 2020.^[6][7]

Format[edit]

The series follows thirty men and women hoping to find love. For ten days in a speed dating format, the men and women date each other in different "pods" where they can talk to each other, but not see each other. Whenever they decided, the men were able to propose to the woman they want to marry. After the proposal, and meeting face to face for the first time, the engaged couples headed to a couples retreat in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. During this trip they spent time getting to know their partners and were able to meet the other couples participating in the experiment.

Following the couples retreat, the engaged couples moved to the same apartment complex back in Atlanta. While at the apartments, they all met their partners' families and explored their partners' living conditions. On the day of the wedding, the engaged couples carried out wedding ceremonies and needed to make their final decisions at the altar about whether to split up or get married, answering the question "Is love blind?"

Season summary[edit]

Contestants[edit]

Notes

Episodes[edit]

On January 30, 2020, it was announced that Love Is Blind would be released across three weeks. The first five episodes were released on February 13, with four episodes the following week. The finale was released on February 27, 2020.^[3] A reunion episode was released on March 5 on Netflix and YouTube.

Production[edit]

Filming[edit]

Filming took place in Atlanta, Georgia, from October 9, 2018, and lasted 38 days up until the weddings. The couples met face-to-face on October 19.^[15] The ten days in the pods were shot at Pinewood Atlanta Studios in Fayetteville.^[16] Then, after the newly engaged couples left the pods, filming took place at the Grand Velas Riviera Maya in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, when all the couples went on a retreat. The relationships that made it through the retreat in Mexico move in together in an apartment complex.^[17] After the retreat, the couples headed back to Atlanta to the Spectrum on Spring apartment building, where they spent the rest of the time filming up until the weddings.^[18][19] The weddings took place at two event spaces called Flourish Atlanta^[19] and The Estate^[20] on November 15.

Release[edit]

The trailer for Love Is Blind was released on January 30, 2020.^[21] With the trailer, it was announced that the ten-episode series would be released on a three-week schedule: the first five episodes were released on February 13, 2020, the next four on February 20, and the finale on February 27.^[3]

On February 26, 2020, Netflix announced a reunion special available on YouTube on March 5.^[5]

Unaired engagements[edit]

A total of eight couples got engaged among the participants. In addition to the six couples shown on the series, couples Westley Baer and Lexie Skipper and Rory Newbrough and Danielle Drouin also got engaged in the show. Newbrough told People, "As we were preparing to go to the Mexico trip, the leads of the show came in and said, 'Hey, we were expecting maybe one or two [engagements]. The shows we've done before, we've never had this much success. We prepared for five. Then we got eight engagements, so we had to pick who we were going to follow.' We got our phones back. They thanked us graciously and said, 'Sorry, we just don’t have enough to cover everybody.'"^[14]

After getting engaged in the pods, Baer and Skipper continued to date for three months before breaking up. Newbrough and Drouin took a week-long trip to Miami together after getting engaged. They broke up after returning from the trip and Drouin decided to pursue a relationship with another participant on the show, Matt Thomas. Thomas and Drouin later split as well.^[14]

Reception[edit]

Viewership[edit]

During the week of the finale, Love Is Blind became Netflix's number-one trending program,^[22][23][24] likely due to large scale stay-at-home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[25]Netflix recorded that Love Is Blind had delivered 1.5 million viewers for the first five episodes, 1.3 million for the next four episodes, and 829 thousand for the finale episode in its first full week.^[26] As of December 16, 2020, the reunion episode had been viewed by over 1.9 million viewers on YouTube alone.^[27] At their Q1 meeting in April 2020, Netflix reported 30 million households had watched the series.^[28]

On March 24, 2020, Love Is Blind was renewed for a second and third season.^[6][7]

Critical response[edit]

The review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 74% based on 23 reviews, with an average rating of 5.75/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Addictive, but problematic, Love Is Blind is undoubtedly an intoxicating binge, but its version of romance often comes off more toxic than aspirational."^[29]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 62 out of 100 based on nine critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[30]

Tricia Crimmins of Mashable reviewed the first five episodes of Love Is Blind following their initial release on February 13. Comparing it to The Bachelor, Crimmins called the series "the bizarre reality TV experiment you've been craving". She comments that you never know what the couples will do next, even down to the altar at the wedding, making the series "harmless, entertaining, and satisfying."^[17]

Lucy Mangan of The Guardian gave Love Is Blind a rating of 2 out of 5 stars, calling it toxic, revolting, but extremely addictive. She says that Love Is Blind is the final nail in the coffin of humanity; however, in terms of reality television, she states that it is good because it "exploits emotional frailties, profaning the sacred, making the private and precious public and worthless and turning it into voyeuristic ratings-bait." Despite all of this, she recommends the show as a casual reality television binge, similar to The Bachelor.^[31]

Kristen Baldwin of Entertainment Weekly called the series "intensely tragic yet riveting." She criticized the series, saying that the first four episodes in the pods feel new and fresh, but once the engaged couples enter the real world, it feels like just another bad dating reality television show. Baldwin also called it depressing, citing the contestants always saying, "If I don't get married now, I never will." Overall, Baldwin gave Love Is Blind a C+ rating.^[32]

Writing in Skeptical Inquirer Craig Foster and Minjung Park raised concerns about the way in which the programme poses hypotheses and then conducts experiments with small sample sizes of participants who are not assigned to either an experimental or a control group. This does not allow a genuine examination of the independent variable and poses a problem if social scientists want to test the suppositions because they would be constrained by ethical considerations if they attempted to recreate anything like the show. The article concluded that while the show can be enjoyed as reality television that dramatises relationships, it is "important to recognize that real science involves a careful and ethical process conducted by experts who scrutinize each other’s work.^[33]

Accolades[edit]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

Love Is Blind on Netflix