Netflix’s “Love is Blind” just finished its fourth season. PHOTO CREDIT: cinemablend.com
“Love is Blind,” a popular dating reality show on Netflix, finished its fourth season with an attempt at a live finale on Sunday, April 16.
The show gained popularity for its unique premise, where contestants go on blind dates (literally) in “pods,” or rooms where you can’t see your date but you can talk to them. After multiple dates in the pods, the contestants decide if the social experiment was successful and see if it’s possible to fall in love with someone without ever seeing what they look like.
Viewers also seem to love the train wreck that ensues during the season-long experiment, partially due to Netflix’s affinity for choosing awful people to participate.
This season’s questionable cast consists of the couples Tiffany and Brett, Zack and Bliss, Chelsea and Kwame, Micah and Paul and Marshall and Jackie.
Three couples ended up married: Tiffany and Brett, Chelsea and Kwame and Zack and Bliss. Despite Zack initially proposing to another woman, Irina, that romance quickly fizzled out when they met in person and Irina said Zack looked like a cartoon character that didn’t blink. Zack quickly realized he proposed to the wrong woman, and after a lot of groveling, Bliss accepted the apology and the ring.
All three couples are still married, as seen in the show’s finale, which took place in real time a year after originally filming the show, and although there’s no way to know what happens when the cameras are off, all three couples appear to be genuinely happy in their relationships.
At the altar, Paul said “no” to Micah, and even though they tried dating after their failed wedding, Micah ended up on the opposite side and broke it off with Paul.
With Marshall and Jackie, the two didn’t even make it to their wedding day, and called it quits after Jackie decided Marshall wasn’t manly enough for her. Despite being drawn to his sensitive side in the pods, Jackie said that in real life it didn’t work for her, and ended up leaving Marshall for Josh, who she previously rejected in the pods to pursue things with Marshall. At the reunion, Jackie and Josh said they were still dating a year later and had also moved in together.
While I could go on and on about the contestants and the wrong choices they made throughout the season, I think much of that discourse is already heavily present on social media, and I’d instead like to discuss the reasons why there are so many problems within the show.
Personally, I think that Netflix chooses morally gray contestants on purpose to create drama to bring in viewers. Vanessa and Nick Lachey, a married couple that hosts the show, constantly tell the contestants to take the experiment seriously for the best chance at finding love, but it seems ingenuine when you get into the details of how the show works.
First, the contestants go on individual dates in the pods with all of the contestants of the opposite sex. If you like someone, you continue going on dates with them, and if you don’t you stop.
After about a week of talking, contestants must decide if they think they’ve found the one and either leave or propose. Yes, propose after only a week of knowing each other.
I think that this so-called “social experiment” could actually be really interesting and successful if the contestants were given realistic parameters. Why can’t they talk in the pods and decide to, I don’t know, date instead?
If the creators of the show really wanted their contestants to succeed, they wouldn’t force them to get married in order to stay on the show, and that brings up another problem with the show: the awful contestants.
The first season of “Love is Blind” is the best in terms of genuineness because no one knew what they were getting into, and I think that’s why we see a lot of successful couples from that season. After that, people saw how popular the show was and how much attention the contestants received, so many people applied for the show for their shot at fame, not because they genuinely wanted love.
In fact, this season, when Jackie was rekindling her relationship with Josh, she said she wasn’t ready for a commitment but wanted to see where the relationship could go.
The only explanation for saying you’re not ready for a commitment in a show where the whole point is to get married, is that you went on the show with ulterior motives.
I also think the whole premise of love being blind isn’t being truly tested because all of the contestants are conventionally attractive. Of course, love will be blind if you have an entire cast of hot people. I would love to see a season of regular, ugly people and see how the “experiment” plays out then.
Looking at the very end of season four, Netflix’s failed attempt at a live finale was the perfect way to end this disaster of a show.
The live ending was supposed to happen at 8 p.m. EST, so I sat at my computer with a blanket and my dinner, waiting for the drama to unfold. At 8:05 p.m. when the live stream still hadn’t started, I started eating. At 8:15 p.m. I was done with my food. At 8:45 I had done some homework. At 9:00 p.m. I got in the shower. At 9:25 p.m. I was done with my shower and the live stream still hadn’t started.
Netflix ended up filming the finale instead and releasing it like a regular episode, which was annoying because there was no real reason for a live finale over a regular episode in the first place. Netflix was probably trying to compete with other popular live-streaming services to get a foot in that industry, but, as only the company’s second-ever attempt at a live-streamed event, they clearly weren’t prepared for it and ended up embarrassing themselves.
After a long wait, the resulting 96-minute episode was an overall disappointment, this time due to Vanessa and Nick Lachey. As a host of a reunion episode, your job is to ask juicy questions from an unbiased perspective, which the Lacheys failed to do. They didn’t ask the right questions, they didn’t answer them from an impartial point of view and they didn’t tell the audience any information that wasn’t already available on social media.
I do have a lot of critiques and personal problems with the show, but I don’t think anyone watches this show to see a scientific experiment about romance. “Love is Blind” blatantly takes advantage of people’s feelings for the sake of making drama-filled TV, and if contestants keep subjecting themselves to being part of this drama, I’ll keep subjecting myself to watching it.