The season finale of Love Is Blind season two dropped on Netflix today but there will be no spoilers here. Because what I really want from this show doesn’t even make it in to begin with.
Love is Blind is definitely one of my top-tier trash TV shows but I find myself consistently frustrated by the complete lack of attention given to the participants in the “experiment” who don’t end up finding a match.
The reality show features 30 people—15 men and 15 women—who spend 10 days dating each other sight unseen, holding their dates in “pods,” meaning comfy rooms separated by a sort of opaque glass wall. But beyond the first five minutes or so of the first episode, we only ever see the 10 participants who end up in one of the couples. Everyone else basically doesn’t exist. (The other contestants do briefly show up for one reunion party midway through the season but they’re still relegated to the background.)
In fact, the show is so hyper-focused on just a few people, there were four people whose journeys weren’t ever even mentioned, despite the fact that they did form couples.
This also happened in season one and at the time, the show’s creator Chris Coelen just said it’s because they “only have so much time to tell a story.” I don’t know why they can’t expand the wildly popular series from 10 episodes to 12 or so, but obviously they have their reasons.
Still, as much as I enjoy this show, I find it maddening that of ten episodes, the basic premise—seeing people dating in the pods—only happens in the first two. After that, they get their romantic getaway (basically a pre-honeymoon), move in together, have lots of fights, and decide whether or not to get married. All of that is interesting but I can’t help but want more from the pods. I want to see more of how these relationships were formed but even more than that, I want to see what the experience was like for the people who, at the end of all of this, must have had a really fascinating experience but never end up making that final connection. What are their stories?
Again, I know there must be reasons for the limited number of episodes but I can’t keep from wanting more, and in dreaming about my ideal version of this show, I keep coming back to another reality series and the interesting ways in which it toys with its format: Love Island.
Love Island (specifically the original UK version—it’s been copied in other countries but I haven’t watched them and can’t speak to their formats) is a summer-long event, airing six episodes a week in near-real-time, with only about a day’s delay between the events as they happen and when they air, allowing audiences at home to play an enormous role in how the show progresses via at-home voting.
That’s an enormous undertaking but the part of Love Island that could be worth emulating on Love Is Blind is that every so often, there will be episodes of “Unseen Bits.” The entire episode is made up of footage from the previous week that didn’t make it to air, and they are delightful. They’re pretty obviously a way for the show to catch a breath in what must be an editing and production nightmare, but they’re also consistently some of the best episodes of the series and major fan favorites.
That is to say, not everything on a reality dating show has to serve the overall narrative 100%. We want to see what these people are going through. We want to see how these bonds are formed (and how they are actively not formed), not just how they progress once they’ve partnered up. We want to see all the fun, sad, messy drama promised in the premise itself.
In season three—which is officially happening—I hope we get to spend more time in the pods, not just with the final couples, but with everyone putting their hearts on the line.
(image: Netflix)
