- Network: Netflix
- Series Premiere Date: Feb 13, 2020
Critic Reviews
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I started watching Netflix’s “Love Is Blind” and didn’t stop until I’d finished all 10 hours of it. I’m trying to recall when I watched a set of preview screeners with the same degree of rapt desire and attention, all the way to the bitter end. (Actually, it was “Cheer,” come to think of it.) On its face, “Love Is Blind” (the first five episodes of which are now streaming) is neither wildly original nor exceptionally good, and yet I am desperate for you to watch it, so that we can yell about it.
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At its best, Love Is Blind is just as bizarre and addictive as its producers clearly intended it to be—but after a while, that delightful strangeness gives way to something more conventional.
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“Love Is Blind,” then, is not “good,” but it is something; each episode feels both structured around a new milestone and nourishing in what gets in on the margins, bits of observations about differences in race or class or age or, crucially, outlook. No one is judged here, but everyone is presented as something like a rounded and full character (if not quite a whole person); each transcends the show’s early inanity and justifies the time we spend with them.
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The show’s not really going to change your mind about whether or not love truly is blind, but it is going to make you scream at your TV a lot (in the good way).
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In many ways, Love Is Blind is a Frankenstein monster sewn together from other reality dating TV shows, combining their most dramatic aspects while attempting to replicate the hum-drum reality of a couple’s every day in the weeks leading up to the big day. For fans of the genre, it’s a delicious romp with just enough twists to keep you guessing, just enough familiarity to keep you entertained.
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The characters read as real, flawed but mostly sympathetic people, rather than the glossy archetypes of The Bachelor, the glittery soap-opera improvisers of the Real Housewives franchise or the ubiquitous thinly disguised actors hoping to use reality TV as springboard to fame. That authenticity makes the stories on Love Is Blind more absorbing for those of us who’ve been bored of reality caricatures for upwards of a decade. Yet it also heightens the cruelty.
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Once the proposals begin and the couples finally meet, the pod experiment evaporates, and Love is Blind becomes just another spin on the whole Married to My 90-day Fiancé at First Sight genre. ... To Netflix’s credit, LIB is an addictive reality show, but it’s also one that will leave you feeling worse than when you started. Call it a guilty displeasure.
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There’s an amazing tonal volatility to “Love Is Blind.” Slabs of crass exploitation abut moments of deep sentiment. There are touching scenes of human vulnerability and harrowing sequences of people lying to themselves at length. Vast idiocies of human behavior provoke moments of thoughtful reflection. The warped glass of the show magnifies universal quirks of human behavior into light comic grotesques.
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Love Is Blind is absurd, revolting, endearing, toxic and wholesome by turns – and addictive as hell throughout.