SEEING IS BELIEVING
Hank Stuever fell for Love is Blind because Netflix is great at reality TV.
Love is Blind Streaming, Netflix
For all the money it spends trying to win Oscars and Emmys, have you noticed that Netflix is better at making the cheap stuff ?
It’s February and we’re still raving about Cheer, the streaming service’s superb six-part docuseries that follows a team of cheerleaders from a small Texas junior college. That show joins Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, Queer Eye, Nailed It! and other non-scripted Netflix shows as a consistent reason to subscribe.
Something about mixing the emotional mayhem of reality TV and one’s private relationship with Netflix just clicks. The reality genre rewards the binge impulse and other forms of obsessive-compulsive watching. Also, there are no commercials — the ceaseless ads for cosmetics, weight-loss programs and car insurance discounts that pester TV’S reality fans into a stupor. And no Andy Cohen, no cross-promotions — no nonsense, really, except for the nonsense of the reality show itself.
I guess this is my way of telling you about the recent afternoon I started watching Netflix’s Love is Blind and didn’t stop until I’d finished all 10 hours of it. I’m trying to recall when I watched a set of preview screeners with the same degree of rapt desire and attention, all the way to the bitter end.
On its face, Love is Blind is neither wildly original nor exceptionally good, and yet I am desperate for you to watch it, so that we can yell about it. It’s a dating/ relationship show, the kind which TV viewers have only seen a thousand times before, in ABC’S long-running series The Bachelor and the countless attempts by other networks to rival it.
Love is Blind begins with a hokey premise that’s been tried before in various ways, wondering if, in the era of Tinder swiping, the chances for a relationship might be better if you removed looks and first impressions from the equation. Several single men and women sign up for what they all keep referring to, until the very end, as “the experiment.” Ah yes, it’s all just for science.
Segregated by gender, the participants get several opportunities each day to go on “dates” with someone from the other side of the wall. In private lounges, the man and woman can just talk, separated by an opaque partition. The only means of attraction is conversation — asking questions, listening to answers. In a text-before-talk era where people treat making a phone call as a presumptuously rude act, these participants — in their mid-20s to early 30s — all seem eager to see if it’s possible to fall in love with somebody just from the sound of their voice and the spark of conversation.
Falling in like before the big reveal won’t do. These people are required, by the inherent nuttiness of reality television, to fall in love enough so that after a few days, marriage proposals are made — sight unseen.
As proposals are made and five newly formed couples get a first look at one another as fiancés and fiancées, the show begins to ape Lifetime’s Married at First Sight, only with a twisted reversal of stages, in which the couples are sent off to a honeymoon-like trip at a Mexican beach resort, followed by a few weeks of living together as couples in neutral, open-floor plan apartments in Atlanta, where all the participants permanently reside. Along the way there are families to meet and a wedding to plan (think TLC’S 90 Day Fiance and Say Yes to the Dress). The final episode, viewers are promised, will feature the big walk down the aisle, where, at last, they will have the choice to say I do — or no thanks.
The far more compelling
(and worthwhile) narrative at
Love is Blind’s centre involves Cameron, a strapping, 29-yearold former firefighter turned artificial-intelligence scientist, who falls in love with the voice of Lauren, a 32-year-old content creator. Cameron is white and Lauren is black; despite whatever nonsense comes and goes in any reality show, the two make a convincing case that love can transcend any barrier. He’s all in, lovey-dovey and then some, while she’s a bit more hesitant (but also smitten). Like any biracial couple, they have some serious territory to navigate, even in 2020.
It’s here, perhaps, where Netflix’s strength as a reality-tv provider becomes clear. In this all-you-can-eat format, far less energy is spent editing the stories around the false construct of commercial breaks and cliffhangers designed to stretch from one crisis to the other. Love is Blind is in no danger of turning into a serious documentary project, but it’s also not as obligated to follow the genre’s prescribed tropes down to the letter.