Love Is Blind has been accused of having a diversity problem, which the creator is defending after season 8 backlash.
Chris Coelen spoke to Entertainment Weekly on Tuesday, February 18, about how the newest installment of episodes has the largest cast but appears to be the least diverse, saying, “Well, the show casts itself.”
Coelen, 57, clarified that a lack of diversity wasn’t intentional.
“We put people in the pods, and you try to have a very diverse group of people in lots of different ways [at the start],” he explained. “And then the people who get engaged are the people who get engaged. The people who fall in love are the people who fall in love.”
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Love Is Blind, which debuted in February 2020, focused on 30 men and women who occupy windowless rooms, called pods, that allowed them to talk to potential partners and form connections without knowing what the other person looked like. While being guided by Nick and Vanessa Lachey through the speed dating, contestants pair off and prepare to get engaged less than two weeks later.
While most connections don’t end in a success story, fans have been entertained by the ups and downs that came with the reality TV series. Over the first seven seasons, Love Is Blind featured casts that were about 50 percent non-white contestants on average, while season 8 is only around 30 percent non-white.
“If you’re sort of trying to tick a box, there were lots of people who were in the group coming into the pods who ultimately just didn’t find their person and who we didn’t choose to [follow],” Coelen added before pointing out how the couples at the center of the story are based on decisions made by the cast members. “It’s like [how] we chose to tell the Madison-Meg-Mason-Alex story because it felt really worthwhile telling.”
He continued: “There are 32 stories times however many people each person dates. So if each person starts off dating 16 people, do the math, that’s, I don’t know, close to 1,000 stories? Something like that. And you can only tell so many of them.”
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Despite the online backlash, Coelen clarified that the goal is to start each season with a diverse cast, but it is out of their control how the connections progress from there.
“We always, always, always strive to seed the pods for the greatest possible success, and within that, diversity of not only ethnicity or race, but backgrounds, and financial status, and body types and looks and all that stuff,” he shared. “You’re less concerned about that, to be honest, than just trying to have a group of people that you hope are somewhat compatible and then seeing what happens. And like I said, then they cast the show for us. We don’t decide, ‘Oh, this is a good couple. That’s a good couple.’ We don’t steer it in any way. They figure it out on their own.”
The first six episodes of Love Is Blind‘s new season are streaming on Netflix. Episodes 7-9 will be available on February 21, and episodes 10-11 will debut on February 28.
