The latest entry in the annals of coverage of the Netflix reality show Love Is Blind goes behind the scenes for the filming of season seven. Creator Chris Coelen drops a new group of singles into his “experiment”—and wrestles with the lawsuits against the show:
Love Is Blind’s production company, Kinetic Content, of which Coelen is the founder and CEO, has denied all the allegations. They are a continuing source of irritation for Coelen, who often brings them up unprompted. Our conversations are studded with long, off-the-record interjections. He is aggravated by what he views as an untruthful characterization of the show. From Coelen’s perspective, participants decide whether to have sex, whether to drink, whether to get into fights—that’s all on them. From another perspective, calling it a documentary can be a way to avoid liability for what happens during production.
And Love Is Blind is, of course, not a documentary. The stories may not be produced in the same way “soft-scripted” reality shows are, as Coelen puts it. But in practice, the lines are blurry; producers are neither as fully controlling as some cast members believe nor as purely hands-off as Coelen suggests. There is both coercion and freedom on Love Is Blind: Producers do not script what cast members say, but they do ask leading questions, and some cast members have said they’re encouraged to stay even if they’ve expressed a desire to leave. The interactions I witness are like a form of influence, making some paths feel easier than others, making some choices feel like rebellion and others like following the rules.
Near the end of pods filming, a cast member tells her fiancé that, earlier that day, she had been so overwhelmed she thinks she had a panic attack. Coelen shoots me a glance. “That phrase gets thrown around a lot,” he says. It’s a colloquialism, he adds. It doesn’t mean she really had a panic attack.
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