Inside the Pods With ‘Love Is Blind,’ the Reality TV Juggernaut
As the Netflix series concludes its fourth buzzy, boozy season, its top producers insist that what they see is (mostly) what you get.
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Julia Jacobs and
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Peahens choose peacocks with more elaborate feathers, earthworms mate based on size, and baboons judge on hierarchy, but humans, as more intellectually evolved creatures, have been socialized instead to seek out love.
For a tiny subset of the species, this mating ritual involves 10 days on a television set in Greater Los Angeles, where participants sit alone in 12-by-14-foot rooms listening to the disembodied voices of potential mates discuss such topics as their ideal number of offspring.
That is the basis for “Love Is Blind,” the voyeuristic Netflix reality series built around buzzwords, booze and mild sensory deprivation that released its Season 4 finale on Friday and is set to air a live reunion special on Sunday. On the show, 30 singles sign up to date each other, separated inside these rooms — known as “pods” — with their conversations fed through speakers. They don’t see whom they’re talking to until they decide to get engaged — a commitment that also comes with a hastily arranged wedding where they can say “I do” or walk away.
If it all sounds rushed, chaotic, a bit unhinged, the show’s creator, Chris Coelen, understands. Brandon Riegg, the Netflix executive who greenlighted the pitch about five years ago, described the idea with a synonym for bat guano, and he recalled telling Coelen that he would be lucky to get even one couple out of it.
Despite the naysayers, Coelen felt confident that people would get engaged. After all, contestants on his show “Married at First Sight” had been marrying strangers for years.
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