The difference between American and UK Love Is Blind
This post contains mild spoilers regarding the outcome of the couples of Love Is Blind: UK
In 1776, desiring independence and freedom, Americans overthrew British rule. Roughly 250 years later, we have finally enacted a singular revenge for English domination: subjecting them to the distinctly American cultural and romantic exercise known as Love Is Blind.
Going on six seasons strong in the US, Love Is Blind has become one of Netflix’s most popular shows and one of the most visible reality romance shows. That’s largely due to Love Is Blind’s pseudo-scientific, lockdown-predicting premise: Men and women, segregated by gender, try to find the love of their lives without ever seeing each other. They communicate only in the “pods,” small separate rooms with a shared wall. The show has yielded a few happy couples, roughly the same number of divorces and splits, an unquantifiable amount of riveting heterosexual mess, and even a handful of lawsuits alleging a toxic environment.
And now, the UK has its own 11-episode version.
The pods, the golden wine chalices, the shared romantic trauma have all made the overseas journey intact. The UK edition is just as watchable as its American predecessor. But the most surprising thing about the UK edition is how earnest and romantic it can be; how the couples give viewers something to root for, which is rare on the American version these days. Love Is Blind: UK feels like being able to time travel back to the first season of American Love Is Blind, before it curdled into the show it has become today.
Why Love Is Blind became a cynical horror show
To understand what makes the UK’s version of Love Is Blind different requires understanding what kind of show American Love Is Blind has become. What was touted as an “experiment” to find out if singles could fall in love sight unseen has, over six seasons, become more and more an exercise in chaos.
It turns out that when you take a group of men and women who, in the name of love, are willing to get engaged to and live with someone they’ve never seen while having their actions filmed, edited, and aired for public consumption on one of the biggest streaming platforms in the world, not every pairing will end in a happily ever after. But the reality show’s emotionally intense premise inevitably brings out the worst in some people — and that’s what producers want.
In season one, which aired fortuitously in 2020 during the pandemic lockdowns, the show produced two marriages and was generally regarded as pretty sweet. But the breakout star was Jessica, a hapless 30-something from Illinois. In the pods, Jessica fell for a man named Barnett who didn’t choose her. She ended up getting engaged to another man named Mark, which seemed more like a strategy to stay on the show long enough to meet Barnett and less an act of love for Mark. During one of her emotional spirals, Jessica fed her dog red wine.
After Jessica’s breakout season, producers started tweaking the format, seemingly in an attempt to maximize the drama. In recent seasons, the cast hangs out more and more as a group on camera, which has little to do with the “experiment” but does increase the potential for jealousy and regret. We’ve also learned, via lawsuits filed against the show, that there’s an abundance of alcohol on set and some alleged sleep deprivation — an unhealthy combination on top of how emotionally fraught being on a reality show already is.
It isn’t difficult to see why many couples on this show tend to flame out, even once they’ve left the high-pressure, surreal circumstances under which they met. And it’s really not a surprise that people on this show behave badly, sometimes in extremely embarrassing ways. They’re at the mercy of a machine designed to create disaster, and it’s produced some of reality television’s biggest villains.
Season two introduced a beautiful menace named Shaina who, like Jessica, haunted the match she made in the early part of the show. That installment also brought us Shake, a man who was solely invested in finding a woman light enough that he could carry her on his shoulders. Cole, in season five, had flies in his toilet and may or may not have body-shamed his fiancée by monitoring the number of cutie oranges she ate. Season six featured a slew of off-screen scandals, one of which was that Trevor, a handsome fan favorite, was allegedly dating someone else when the show started filming. The sixth chapter also featured Jeramey, a man who broke off his engagement because one of his pod suitors slid into his DMs during filming.
At this point, the title Love Is Blind couldn’t be more hollow. Something is blind, but it doesn’t seem to be love. For many Americans watching at home, the show isn’t so much about witnessing the power of romance as it is watching a new crop of hopefuls unfurl the reddest flags you’ve ever seen — and breathing a sigh of relief that you will never have to date these people.
And while the real “experiment” has been tweaking the show format until it became this cruel torture factory, it’s the fact that the UK version isn’t totally like that makes it entirely watchable.
Why Love Is Blind: UK feels like a different show
Perhaps it’s because it’s the first season, or maybe because Brits just love differently (Love Island notwithstanding), but the Netflix reality spinoff has transformed into a more earnest and hopeful version of itself across the pond. Six couples made it out of the pods, and according to reports, there were five couplings that did not make it to air. That’s a wildly successful batting average compared to American Love Is Blind (season five featured only two engaged couples).
A huge part of that is the UK cast and casting directors really went above and beyond their call of duty this season.
There’s Freddie, a 32-year-old who goes to the gym twice a day, and is probably the most handsome and well-muscled funeral director you will ever see in your life. Similarly, his match Catherine is a beautiful dental nurse who also teaches children with Down syndrome how to swim. While I have no doubt that people this good-looking and just plain good exist in real life, I am not sure any of us would ever meet them, especially not on reality TV.
Aside from being very attractive, endearing people, what makes Freddie, Catherine, and the rest of their ilk so watchable is that they feel incredibly real. Obviously, authenticity on reality TV is an extremely relative, sliding scale. But from their bashful first face-to-face meeting to bickering about how annoying Freddie is when Cat takes him shopping, they seem to genuinely want their relationship to work out. Hot people can be very annoying, too — perhaps Freddie was never taught how to properly behave in department stores — and it’s nice to see Cat address it and Freddie not sugarcoat his faults for the camera.
The same goes for Tom and Maria, who have one of the show’s more honest arguments. She’s a makeup artist and asks him if he would ever date her in real life. He, a PR exec, truthfully tells her that prior to the experiment, he would not have dated someone in her profession.
“I was a little bit judgemental when I first heard what you did,” Tom tells Maria, before continuing with a mild understatement. “I can be a bit judgy at times.”
She’s hurt and ends the conversation. He’s miffed that she can’t see he’s changed his mind. They both don’t do a good job of resolving this issue, and perhaps that’s an issue that could never be resolved. (Spoiler: Tom and Maria do not get married.)
Tom’s brutal assessment is the kind of conflict central to this show’s alleged mission. The basis of Love Is Blind is that people are all so confined by who we think we’ll fall in love with and what they’ll look like that we won’t consider romance with people who don’t fit into those boxes. If the boxes are eliminated, people might be able to find the love of their life — or not. Tom and Maria grapple with an honest, relatable struggle that might not have ever happened if not for the show’s heightened stakes.
Tom and Maria’s disconnect over her job and Cat and Freddie’s squabble over his shopping decorum are such a far cry from the absolute bedlam happening on the American version, it raises the question of why or how. The closest the UK ever gets is a love triangle between Nicole, her match Benaiah, and a pod suitor named Sam. Though Benaiah warns Nicole that Sam isn’t there “for the right reasons,” she still picks Sam before realizing her mistake. The implied incorrect “reason” is that Sam seems more of the type of guy you’d find on Love Island, the UK’s very popular dating show where contestants have gone on to become influencers.
Sam seems more determined to get famous and gain followers than find love, and it’s easy in this first UK iteration of Love Is Blind to spot that kind of contestant. Sam sticks out because everyone’s so fresh and new to the show, and many haven’t yet figured out how it all works. People are still having honest fights about their jobs and talking about their hopes and dreams, and Sam is just a little too smooth, too rehearsed. He resembles a couple of his American season six counterparts.
Whether the show is able to exist in its current state is perhaps the most delicate and interesting thing about it. The longer the show continues (it’s already been renewed for a second season), the higher the risk that it will eventually run into the American problem of participants who are too aware of themselves and too knowledgeable about how the Netflix hit works. There will, almost inevitably, be more and more Sams, possibly plucked from the pool of hots who were not hot enough to be on Love Island. There will likely be more and more producer interference. These tweaks might even make the show more popular, but it won’t be like this first, very good season.