From left: Love Is Blind Season 8 stars Ben Mezzenga, Taylor Haag, and Joey Leveille.Photo:Adam Rose/Netflix (3)
Adam Rose/Netflix (3)
Warning: This story contains spoilers from season 8 ofLove Is Blind.
Love Is Blind’s creator Chris Coelen is setting the record straight about thediversity on season 8.
“Well, the show casts itself,” Coelen explained. “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.”
Love Is Blind participants in the pods.Netflix
Netflix
He continued: “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].”
In the past, about half the contestants were white, but this time around, that number is closer to 70%, according toEW.
Moreover, of the 32 Minneapolis-based participants — the largest group in the show’s five-year run — only one Black man and woman made it out of the pods (Virginia Miller, 34, and Devin Buckley, 29). The rest of the featured couples were all white, with the exception of Monica Danús, 27, who identifies as half-Chilean.
“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,” Coelen noted.
From left: Love Is Blind Season 8 stars Alex Brown, Meg Fink, and Mason Horacek.Adam Rose/Netflix (3)
When going through the footage, he said it is impossible to share everyone’s experience in the pods. Although Coelen said diversity is important to the franchise, viewers end up seeing the participants with the most intriguing stories.
“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,” he said. “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.”
“It’s like [how] we chose to tell the Madison-Meg-Mason-Alex story because it felt really worthwhile telling,” he added. “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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The first six episodes ofLove is Blindseason 8 are streaming now on Netflix. Episodes 7-9 will be released Friday, Feb. 21.
source: people.com
