Love Is Blind has faced backlash over the years for a lack of diversity.
Each season, fans call the show out and in a new interview, the Netflix dating show’s creator and executive producer Chris Coelen is addressing the backlash and viewers calling season eight the whitest season.
Keep reading to find out more…
“Well, the show casts itself,” he told EW. “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]. 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.”
“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],” he added.
Chris notes that if they don’t make connections, it’s hard to feature them, and he opened up about the statistics of showing every date.
“It’s like [how] we chose to tell the Madison-Meg-Mason-Alex story because it felt really worthwhile telling,” he shared. “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.”
The creator says they strive to start the season with a diverse cast, then see how the connections pan out.
“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,” Chris 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.”
If you missed it, a season eight cast member, whose dates were heavily featured, revealed why he didn’t get engaged at the end of the pods episodes.
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