Taylor from ‘Love is Blind’ talks about ethnicity chat with Garrett
The “Love is Blind” Season 7 cast member says she withheld her Chinese mom’s name, Fong, due to receiving uncomfortable comments in the past.
After the Season 8 reunion Sunday, backlash from viewers is rising about the quality of men on the show, which allows potential couples to date sight unseen before getting engaged and deciding whether love “is truly blind” enough for a marriage.
Five years after the inaugural season of “Love is Blind,” Netflix’s hit reality-dating show continues to cause a stir.
In response, Ally Simpson, the executive producer of the show, has a message for potential applicants she hopes will resonate: Nice guys finish first.
“If you look at the husbands who come from the show, it’s the really nice guys who it works out for,” she said in an interview with Rolling Stone published Monday. “We just need nice men. Sometimes I feel like social media is scaring some nice guys off, so we’ve enlisted the help of some former participants who are big fans and they’ll sometimes get on (the phone) with people before they come (on the show) and answer questions about what’s it’s really like and they’ll put them at ease.”
Only one couple out of the four followed on the show decided to tie the knot this season: Taylor Haag and Daniel Hastings.
The remaining pairs duked it out during the tense reunion episode Sunday night.
That the program moves from city to city and plucks “regular” folk out of their everyday lives to see who can find lasting love has helped to distinguish it among its peers as a bona fide microcosm of American dating life.
Season 8, shot in Minnesota, played right into that narrative with several women saying no at the altar or being influenced in part by their partner’s political or social beliefs. Their decisions arrive amid a growing gender gap in American politics.
“Those are the kinds of things that make or break relationships,” Simpson told Rolling Stone. “We take it very seriously that we are able to talk about these important topics in a way that most unscripted shows can’t, and we want to be a reflection of society at large.”
The season also came under fire for a lack of diversity. While previous casts were about 50% non-white, Season 8 was only around 30% non-white, Entertainment Weekly reports.
In response, creator Chris Coelen told EW that it wasn’t intentional but 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),” Coelen told EW. “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).”
‘Love is Blind’ producer insists set is supportive place for contestants
Simpson also leaned heavily throughout the interview on how supportive of an environment “Love is Blind” can be. Her emphasis stands in stark contrast to claims made by some former contestants, in a push to unionize the cast, who allege their contracts unlawfully prevented them from speaking out and trapped them in a production environment with unsafe working conditions.
In December, the National Labor Relations Board sided with the contestants, issuing a complaint that accused Kinetic Content, the production company behind the show where Simpson is vice president of content programming, of labor violations.
“There’s a lot of rumors out there about (behind the scenes of) the show, but it’s really a few of us who care so much about these people trying to provide the right support,” Simpson told Rolling Stone, in a seeming reference to the NLRB dispute.
She cited a moment from Season 8, in which Haag suspected Hastings had followed her on Instagram prior to filming and the crew allowed her to have her phone back to check and for the two to have lunch away from the cameras.
“I think a moment like that is real evidence of the show’s support for couples,” Simpson said.
Don’t expect another live ‘Love Is Blind’ reunion
Asked if they would attempt to do another live reunion, after a 2023 debacle in which the Netflix stream did not load, Simpson said she prefers the taped format.
“In the future, it’s not something I would really push for,” she said. “I come from a place of wanting the participants to feel like they have the chance to say everything that they want to say and sometimes that means letting them breathe and take their time to think about what they want to say. There’s a pressure that comes with doing it live. These are normal, real people, and I think it’s an unfair pressure to put them under them.”
