Is Love Is Blind UK as bad as other dating shows? Here's what works, what doesn't, and what the future of the show should look like...
ADVERTISEMENTI’m a bit under the weather at the moment. Instead of curling up in bed at a reasonable hour last night and catching up on an indie gem that I’ve let slip by, I opted to indulge in some chewing gum for the brain.
As anyone who’s felt rotten will know, sometimes there’s nothing quite like sitting down with the latest reality TV show and becoming part of the cultural conversation. It’s not a guilty pleasure – I despise that concept – and more a “OK, left side of brain, you can take five while righty will suffer through this for the sake of writing an article about it tomorrow.”
I confess that don’t usually watch too many dating shows, having been burned before – more on that in a bit. However, I threw caution to the wind and gave the latest one a go: Netflix’s Love Is Blind UK.
The show previously premiered in the US in 2020 and since then, there have been several international versions, including Love is Blind: Japan / Germany / Sweden / Mexico... and now Blighty.
The series follows a group of men and women, hoping to find love. For a period – there are no time markers, which makes this a bizarrely claustrophobic watch - the contestants date each other in "pods" where they can talk to each other but not see each other. It’s essentially blind speed-dating with the added twist that daters may extend a marriage proposal whenever they feel ready. If accepted, the couple meets face to face and the now engaged lovebirds head to a couples' retreat to see if they can make it work before the marriage...
First things first: Love Is Blind UK is not as bad as Love Island, which I’m pretty sure gave me eye chlamydia.
It’s a damn sight better than the US show The Bachelor / The Bachelorette, a morally objectionable trashfire that makes me want to carpet-bomb entire US states every time the current Bachelorette says the word “Todaaaaaaaay” or when the vapid male suitors with the collective IQ of a steak and ale pie repeatedly spout out the same meaningless bullshit about what the sanctity of love is while reveling in platitudes so clichéd that all my focus goes on whether the Bachelorette has mouthwash handy after kissing so many contestants in each episode. ‘STI’ does not stand for ‘Sexual Turn-on, Innit’.
And even that show is head and shoulders above Too Hot To Handle – another Netflix title which I had the misfortune of watching during Covid lockdown.
That show saw a group of 20-something attention-starved “commitment-phobic swipers” embark on a “sexual adventure” on an Edenesque island. During said adventure, LANA, a virtual assistant that looks like an electronic buttplug, announces the guidelines: no kissing, no sex of any kind, and no self-abuse whatsoever. If the horndogs break these rules and engage in any sexual contact on the island, they’re reprimanded by the AI and the collective prize money the contestants are all playing for decreases.
This keep-your-pants-on-Love Island pitch - loosely based on an episode of Seinfeld (‘The Bet’), where each character competes to see if they can give up masturbation - very quickly revealed itself as the reason why no contact had yet been made with alien lifeforms.
Indeed, the show convinced me that extraterrestrial beings were studying our cultural output and with Too Hot To Handle’s release concluded that we didn't deserve a morsel of their empathy because we’re essentially a bunch of lobotomised drones binging whatever shit pellet we’re fed through our screens, making us not worthy of a violent colonisation.
But I digress...
Compared to these shows, Love Is Blind UK is a veritable balm for the soul.
Damning with faint praise though that may be, I enjoyed the camaraderie on show, with lots of hugs and encouraging words said between the contestants. I also didn't find myself too repulsed by the swaggering "Alpha energy" found in a lot of these shows. They all seem nice enough – to the extent I started to feel bad for the background players who are clearly the designated extras, only there to pad out the numbers.
Ok, there is Sam, the petulant and love-bombing man-child who gives off the impression that his future partner could be anyone as long as he can continue to play the game, with his incessant “trust me” line which gave off icky Matt Hancock vibes – with an emphasis on the last four letters of the former UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care's name. Sam's proposal to Nicole was one of the most joyless and depressing things I’d ever seen. And I rewatch the blisteringly bleak horror film Martyrs a hell of a lot. He’s not sinister by any means – just one of those “why don’t girls ever pick the nice guys?” lads which makes him a walking red flag who's perfect for these sort of shows.
ADVERTISEMENTSam aside, the general lack of arseholery, coupled with Catherine’s tears at Freddy’s proposal, Maria’s dancing, and the rather moving way Sabrina opens up to vulnerability, actually made me... dare I say it... enjoy the binge.
I blame the fever.
There are three things I didn’t enjoy so much...
First, the lack of humour throughout. For a nation like the UK, which prides itself on its “banter” - an annoying term for attempting to find the sweet spot between being charmingly acerbic and a horrible prick – this is a major oversight.
ADVERTISEMENTI’m told that my second qualm is a recurring issue with this series: the concept itself, which is hypocritical in the extreme.
Despite enjoying the “It's what is on the inside that matters” premise and that there’s no need to be physically seen in order to be seen, something’s amiss. As a psycho-social "experiment" purporting to support that looks aren’t everything and that personal connections triumph above all else, Love Is Blind is insulting and should know better by now.
The question of whether people can fall in love without eye contact is undermined by a glaring double-standard: all the contestants are either conventionally attractive or downright gorgeous.
You can lament the state of a superficial modern dating scene, where apps have everyone looking for the quickest upgrade, all you want; but without diverse casting that looks beyond heterosexuality and the non-disabled, for example, the “love is blind” line is redundant in the extreme.
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My final niggle is that the first four episodes are out now, and the contestants have escaped the pods by the last episode.
This means that while I’ll soldier on with this admittedly bingeable show, my main source of enjoyment has been destroyed.
You see, much like I was praying that Too Hot To Handle would end up revealing itself as a remake of The Most Dangerous Game, where the insufferable bunch of numbnuts would be hunted by a Russian aristocrat named Count Zaroff, the setting of Love Is Blind played out like a sci-fi horror movie for me.
The contestants all lined up in a row to enter the dystopian pods, which are frequently filmed from above with darkness surrounding them...
ADVERTISEMENTThere’s no concept of time or place, leading me to think all of this was taking place in some sort of underground bunker...
I found myself indulging in the slightly disturbing visuals and positing that Love Is Blind was a post-apocalyptic show. The players in this futuristic Noah’s Ark became the survivors of an intergalactic genocide, wherein the Lovecraftian monster hovers outside the shelter, watching the huddled human leftovers play in the aquarium when it isn’t admiring the wasteland it has reduced humanity to.
Love Is Blind may not be as good as First Dates (few things are) and it certainly doesn’t solve modern love’s problems with its insincere premise. However, once you shatter the illusion that there is still an outside world and that these players aren’t the spares of a bloodthirsty Kraken who has placed them in a bubble outside of the ripped fabric of time, then you’ve lost me.
I can only hope that Netflix execs are reading and will amend this upsetting situation for future seasons. In the meantime, I’ll be heading to the pharmacy to get better drugs.
ADVERTISEMENTThe first four episodes of Love Is Blind: UK are out now. Three more will drop on 14 August, and the finale airs on 21 August.
