Chris Coelen Explains the Lack of Diversity in ‘Love Is Blind’… Again
Love Is Blind has received a lot of criticism after deciding to base its latest season in the Twin Cities. Fans don’t just feel like they’ve overstayed their welcome in the pods along with the show’s contestants. Additionally, some have questioned the show’s diversity, which isn’t as varied as the series’ prior seasons. But it’s not the first time creator Chris Coelen found himself having to explain the show’s makeup.
The lack of diversity in ‘Love Is Blind’ Season 8 all comes down to luck
Depending on who’s asked, Minneapolis, Minnesota might not be the kind of place where Love Is Blind can thrive. Reception for this series’ new cast of lovers seems to be slightly mixed. There’s been concern that this new batch of hopeless romantics lacks the spice that, for instance, Charlotte, North Carolina natives brought two seasons ago.
With six more episodes left, it remains to be seen if season 8 will win over its critics. But given the couples that graduated from the pods, what’s set in stone are the couples viewers will be watching in the show’s second half.
A lot of fans have pointed out the show has focused on predominantly white contestants this year. Devon, Brittany, and Virginia were the only non-white participants Love Is Blind gave love to. However, Coelen shared in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that the show didn’t intentionally focus on a particular demographic of contestants. The camera simply went where the romance and the drama were.
“Well, the show casts itself,” Coelen said. “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. 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].”
Additionally, Coelen stated that he prefers, and actively tries to facilitate, more diversity in the show in the beginning of the casting process.
“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 said. “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. 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 not the first time Chris Coelen addressed the ‘Love Is Blind’ diversity problem
Coelen’s remarks echoed statements he made when Love Is Blind was in its earlier stages. But back then, the criticism wasn’t just aimed at the skin color or ethnicity of its cast. There was a concern that the show became more superficial in its casting. Fans felt Love Is Blind began recruiting lovers with more conventionally attractive physiques and abandoning less represented body types. But Coelen reassured at the time that the casting was as blind as the show’s premise.
“Both Season 1 and Season 2, we really tried to have a diverse pool of participants in every sense of what that word means — whether it’s experience or body type or ethnicity or whatever. There’s only so many people that we showed,” Coelen said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
But he admitted that he was just as curious as the fans were about the types of couples that stole the show in his series.
“It’s actually kind of interesting to see who gravitates toward who, and I’ve thought about this, and I’ve talked about this in the past — there’s something that’s very interesting to me, that when you go into an environment where you do strip away all of the trappings of the material world, and you’re in there, there’s some people that just present confidently or flirtatiously or whatever. It’s certainly not like we said, ‘Let’s stack the deck’ No, we had every kind of person that we could find come into this environment, and everybody had an equal opportunity. We don’t steer or control any of it,” he said.
