Love Is Blind (TV series)

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. A 3-part companion piece entitled "After The Altar" was released on July 28, 2021.

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.[36] The ten days in the pods were shot at Pinewood Atlanta Studios in Fayetteville.[37] 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.[38] 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.[39][40] The weddings took place at two event spaces called Flourish Atlanta[40] and The Estate[41] on November 15.

For the show's second series, the pods were shipped from Georgia to be filmed in a newly built studio in Santa Clarita, California[42]

The trailer for Love Is Blind was released on January 30, 2020.[43] 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]

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.'"[34]

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.[34]

During the week of the finale, Love Is Blind became Netflix's number-one trending program,[45][46][47] likely due to large scale stay-at-home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[48] 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 829,000 for the finale episode in its first full week.[49] As of November 5, 2022, the reunion episode had been viewed by over 1.9 million viewers on YouTube alone.[50] At their Q1 meeting in April 2020, Netflix reported 30 million households had watched the series.[51]

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

The review aggregator Rotten 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."[52] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 62 out of 100 based on nine critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[53]

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."[38]

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[54] 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.[55]

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.[56]

Writing in Skeptical Inquirer Craig Foster and Minjung Park raised concerns about the way in which the program 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."[57]