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Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more
Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more
Love Is Blind creator, Chris Coelen, has addressed criticisms about season eight’s lack of diversity.
Viewers were quick to point out that the cast of the Netflix dating show’s eighth season were mostly white following the release of its first six episodes on February 14.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the first seven seasons each had about 50 percent non-white contestants; however, only 30 percent of this season’s cast is non-white.
Coelen has now hit back at the concerns, claiming 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]. And then the people who get engaged are the people who get engaged,” Coelen told Entertainment Weekly.
“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 explained that it’s not easy to feature cast members in episodes if they don’t make a connection with anyone. Each season begins with contestants going on dates in the pods, where there is a wall between them and the person they’re talking to.
Coelen said he tried to make the episodes about the pods longer so contestants who didn’t get engaged had more screen time.
“It’s like [how] we chose to tell the Madison-Meg-Mason-Alex story because it felt really worthwhile telling,” he said, referring to Madison, who formed a connection with Mason before getting engaged to Alex, who she later split from. Meanwhile, Alex also formed a connection with Meg but called off the relationship before his engagement.
“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?” Coelen added. “Something like that. And you can only tell so many of them.”
He continued to explain that when each season begins, the program “strives to seed the pods for the greatest possible success.” That means including cast members who are diverse “of not only ethnicity or race,” but also financial status, body types, looks, and backgrounds.
On X/Twitter, viewers have called out how similar the men on season eight look, specifically singling out Daniel Hastings, Alex Brown, Mason Horacek, Ben Mezzenga, and Dave Bettenburg.
“If ANYTHING shows the importance for DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion], it should be this new season of #LoveIsBlind. Because there’s no way you’re casting these 5 men on the same show, giving them all a large amount of camera time, & expecting me to know the difference,” one person wrote, referencing President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to end all federal DEI programs.
“This season of Love is Blind has the problem where there are too many identical white people that I can’t tell apart,” another post read.
The sixth episode of the season ended with five couples engaged: Monica and Joey, Ben and Sara, David and Lauren, Devin and Virginia, and Daniel and Taylor. The upcoming episodes will see the new couples return to their homes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Per usual, the season will end with couples either saying “I do” or “I don’t” when they get to the altar.
New episodes will be released on Fridays at 3 a.m. ET with episodes seven through nine coming out on February 21, episodes 10 through 11 on February 28, and the finale on March 7.
