The blind lead the oblivious in Netflix’s new reality dating show
The British version of Netflix’s hit US reality dating show Love is Blind has finally been released — but it’s missing the self-deprecating banter promised.
I imagine many readers haven’t watched Love Is Blind, Netflix’s new UK dating show, because you have better things to do with your lives such as plucking your chin hairs. And because, well, it is dreadful.
Thirty young single people are put in one of those Big Brother/Play School type houses but the men and women are separated, their daily “dates” taking place in pods where they can’t see what each other looks like.
If they “fall in love” they get “engaged” through a screen without having laid eyes on each other, with all the attendant awful, melodramatic music.
Then they go on holiday, meet the in-laws and decide if they really do want to get married in a few weeks’ time. So a cross between Cilla’s Blind Date and Married at First Sight, but with all humour surgically removed.
My, these people take themselves seriously: there’s a tsunami of deathly inspirational quotes/therapy speak such as “I’m here for conscious living” and “I want to be the best version of myself” and “If you look after your mental capacity it will impact your emotional capacity” (still deciphering that one).
But there’s also a lot of “Do you meditate?” and “How often do you train?” (some of these people go to the gym not once but TWICE a day! Is this “conscious living”? Discuss).
And obviously there’s gratitude journaling, the new opium of the live, laugh, love brigade.
Where is all the self-deprecating British banter that was promised?
These people all seemed to be picked from the same reality-TV clone farm.
And I must say this show, hosted by married couple Emma and Matt Willis, whom we saw for what felt like less than five minutes in the first four episodes available, is basically hypocritical.
It pretends to be a sort of anti-Love Island in that it is about overlooking the superficial (ie physical looks) and falling for a person’s personality and soul … but then it has chosen 30 very attractive people. No ugly bugs here! So it is about looks after all.
A version of the very successful US show of the same name, it is billed as that old chestnut, a “social experiment”, which is usually a fig leaf for highly staged, exploitative TV.
While there are, to be absolutely fair, decent, quite sweet moments when a couple has genuinely fallen for each other such as Sabrina and Steve, the other money shots are about human pain and humiliation as people are dumped in favour of a better match.
Or a better “connection” as they keep saying. Someone proposed within the first 50 minutes of the show. The answer was yes.
Every reality TV series needs its “villain” and here it is Sam, a product design manager who gives me strong Matt Hancock energy.
Sam doesn’t even do anything that terrible, he’s just a bit of a smooth-talking double-dealer who at one point worries aloud that his girlfriend might be fat.
But I was grateful to him for at least injecting some energy into the endless yakking about “life goals” and trusting one’s “gut”.
Because perhaps the most surprising thing about Love Is Blind is that so far, it is dull.
The second part, just released, looks tastier, if this is your sort of thing, with the couples now abroad together (or not), some of them starting to realise that talking through a wall in a TV pod is perhaps not the best basis to agree to marriage.
Honestly, who’dathoughtit?
Love is Blind UK is streaming on Netflix.
