Spoiler Alert: This story contains spoilers for the first six episodes of Love Is Blind Season 8.
Season 8 of Love Is Blind debuted last week and while some controversy has already begun to play out between one of the couples, the lack of diversity among the cast itself is something many fans noticed before the first six episodes dropped on Valentine’s Day.
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Chris Coelen, the creator of the Netflix dating series, assured the outlet that Season 8 being the least-diverse ‘Love Is Blind’ cast to date wasn’t intentional.
As The Ashley previously reported, Season 8 features 32 singles from Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota– 16 men and 16 women– making this season the largest cast the show has seen since it debuted in 2020.
While more contestants were brought on this season in the hopes of finding love “sight unseen,” only around 30 percent of the Season 8 singles are non-white, according to EW, whereas past seasons have featured casts that were around 50 percent non-white. According to Chris, who is also an executive producer of the dating series, “the show casts itself.”
“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 said. “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].”
Chris noted that it’s difficult to show cast members in the episodes if they don’t make any connections in the pods and while the goal is to begin each season with a diverse cast, the relationships formed throughout the experiment happen naturally.
“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 explained. “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,” he continued. “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.”
While fans of ‘Love Is Blind’ likely noticed that the first six episodes of Season 8 featured more pod interactions between contestants than in past seasons– including couples who didn’t ultimately get engaged– most of those couples were white. Chris claims that in some cases– particularly the story involving Alex Brown, Madison Errichiello and Meg Fink– the story received a lot of screen time because “it felt really worthwhile telling.”
“There are 32 stories times however many people each person dates,” Chris explained. “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 first six episodes of ‘Love Is Blind’ Season 8 are currently streaming on Netflix. The next batch of episodes drop on Friday, February 21.
(Photos: Netflix; Instagram)
7 Responses
Are people really so bored they sit around and worry about the color of the contestants on a dating show? Wish I had the time.
Just go and make a black show about dating then… oh wait there are three of those. People love to fuss about nothing.
Minnesota is not as ethnically diverse as other locations they have used so logic would tell you…
30% blacks is more than dubble the percentage of blacks in the us. So this program is actually more “diverse” than reality. Even if you include other non whites this program is still more “diverse” and therefore actually not representative.
Wtf are you saying? There aren’t 15% of African Americans in the US. Are you delulu?
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/fact-sheet/facts-about-the-us-black-population/
14,4% blacks in 2023.
In the end, it’s productions choice who they showcase. Every season there are couples who are not filmed post pods, for some reason or another.
They chose to highlight these couples.
Also, production casts trash men as contestants.
Consistently.
Last year, a dude had 3 kids. Before that, we had Trevor, Jaramey, and Clay and Kenneth. If they don’t get chosen, well, that’s on them.
The pickins are slim every season.