It’s in that chasm where one loses one’s grip on the actual world, especially if you, like our brave and masochistic contestants, are facing a big life change, particularly of the romantic variety. It’s located in a strange place between those poles, largely staged and synthetic, and yet at times startlingly real. But it’s not a discrete documentary, either. It’s not quite a traditional dating show that you’d watch while soaked in wine on a friend’s couch over the course of a few months. ( 90 Day Fiancé without all the despairing geopolitics, maybe.) Because it’s on Netflix, a platform not exactly built for traditional week-in, week-out reality shows, Love Is Blind has a tang of the almost otherworldly. This is The Bachelor condensed and reshaped, a throwback to the old gimmick reality days of 20 years ago with a decidedly contemporary veneer of earnest, faux sociology. (It does help, though, that everyone is good-looking.) Things get less theoretical and more actual when, after only a week or so, several of the couples get engaged sight unseen, only meeting face to face after the first proposal, then embarking on a fraught month of cohabitation on the way to a quickie wedding. Good looks and whatever other aesthetic concerns are out of the equation these relationships are based on the true connection of conversation.
Netflix’s smash-hit dating show begins as an easily dismissed pseudo experiment: a group of single 20- and 30-somethings, mostly straight, first get to know potential mates while lounging in individual “pods”, with a wall between them (just like in The Fantasticks!).
Somewhere around hour six of Love Is Blind, I worried I’d lost all perspective on reality.