Pod Squad
10 ‘Love Is Blind’ Changes That Would Shake Up the Franchise: All Stars Season & More
If you find talking to a wall romantic, Love Is Blind may be the reality dating show for you.
Since the pods first opened in 2020, the Netflix series has become one of reality TV’s most successful matchmaking shows, with 11 happily married couples to prove it. Utilizing a tried and true formula, Love Is Blind places eligible singles in adjacent pods where they can fall in love without knowing anything about their partner’s physical appearance. Once they’ve found their match, they get engaged, meet their fiancé, go on a getaway together, and then live together for a few weeks before heading down the aisle.
With new romance and drama every season, we’re pretty sure we could never get tired of Love Is Blind. However, with Season 10 on the horizon, we’ve got a few ideas on ways Netflix can shake up its experiment in the future.
From rekindling past flames to weeding out bad seeds, here are 10 changes Love Is Blind should consider.
1. Love Is Blind: College Campus Edition
If you think falling in love through a wall is hard, try falling in love at a liberal arts university. If you’ve been there, you know that on a tiny campus, everybody knows everybody, and that’s not always a good thing. Instead of picking their Pod Squad from a metropolitan area like usual, we’d love to see Love Is Blind cast their eligible singles from the current students at a single college. Can you imagine the horror of walking out to meet your person and seeing your situationship from freshman year? Maybe we’re not shooting for marriage with this younger age range, but we know based on the drama of our own campus experiences, this would be a wild ride.
2. Love Is Blind: All Stars
Many other reality TV shows bring back fan favorite contestants from past seasons for an All Stars edition. Of course, the whole experiment of falling in love sight unseen would be ruined if contestants already knew everyone who could be on the other side of the wall. That is, unless Love Is Blind employed one of the greatest (and more hilarious) disguise tactics: Voice effects.
With ironclad NDAs, a secret cast list, and seasons of missed connections, we’re convinced an All-Stars season of Love Is Blind could be their magnum opus. Imagine the potential for interseason couples! Better yet, imagine if a couple that got together and broke up during their season, found their way back to each other through the sweet sound of some incredibly tasteful voice effects.
3. Love Is Blind: After the Pods
Speaking of fan favorites, at some point, Netflix needs to give us a “Where Are They Now?” season. By this, we don’t mean their successful couples. We already know where they are! But what happened to the singles from early seasons who we haven’t heard from since? Have they found love? Do they still think love is blind? While we wouldn’t want this to replace a classic season of the show, we’d love to know what some of our favorite Pod Squadders are up to now.
4. Is love still blind a week later?
One of the classic questions people ask about reality TV show couples is how they were able to fall in love in such a short time. Was it really love, or was it the pressure cooker of the experiment? To shake things up, Love Is Blind could alter their filming schedule. Our proposal: Send the singles home for a week before they meet their fiancé face-to-face. Will their love fade as quickly as it grew? Will taking a step back cause them to rethink their relationship? Honestly, if everyone breaks up before they meet in person, this wouldn’t be the most exciting season. But, in the spirit of Love Is Blind‘s core experiment, this trial would be incredibly interesting.
Courtesy of Netflix
5. ‘Love is blurry’ twist
This one goes out to Shake Chatterjee, the Season 2 contestant who coined the iconic line “love is blurry” when he explained that he went on the show hoping it would only be “partially” blind. It seems like every season, some contestants come on Love Is Blind who clearly don’t believe in the mission. To weed out the contestants who are there for the wrong reasons, this twist would ask each contestant to guess who they are engaged to from a lineup of everyone on the other side. While we wouldn’t expect anyone to guess the right person, we believe the way someone would handle the situation would say a lot about their character.
6. Love Is Blind: Queer Love
Honestly, we’re shocked this one hasn’t happened already. The Ultimatum: Queer Love was a massive success for Netflix, and with Season 2 on its way, it’s about time the queer joy spreads to the pods. Love Is Blind currently has their contestants separated into men’s and women’s quarters during the experiment portion of the season. However, living together isn’t the most core element to the Pod Squad’s experience, so if none of the contestants met until proposals, one person could easily date anyone there. If the shared quarters are truly the only thing keeping Netflix from having a season featuring same-sex and nonbinary singles, we have a solution for that, too. Welcome back, funny voice effects, no one will recognize who they’re talking to with you around.
7. Love Is Blind: Sight Unseen
Have you ever seen those videos of the Love Is Blind watch parties where they throw a blanket over their TV, so they can join the contestants in not knowing anyone’s appearance? We think that a super fun way Netflix could game-ify Love Is Blind is giving viewers the option to watch sight unseen (almost like a podcast) until the couples begin to head to their big reveals. By just showing a contestant’s name while they’re speaking, Netflix could put fans directly in the shoes of the Pod Squad!
8. Golden Love Is Blind
We’ve been thinking a lot about The Golden Bachelor recently. While the program is responsible for multiple love stories, both seasons’ aftermath has shown us that love isn’t everything when it comes to marriage. It’s hard to realistically bring two people with children (and grandchildren) together who are from different sides of the country. However, unlike The Bachelor, Love Is Blind factors location into their experiment, picking people from one locale. If Love Is Blind upped their age range to feature retirement-age singles, we think their experiment would be a fantastic format to create Golden couples that could function in the real world.
9. Love Is Blind channels Big Brother
While we’re in the business of Love Is Blind-ifying concepts from other popular shows, there’s one more mashup we’d love to see: Love Is Blind x Big Brother. We know a “Head of Household” competition has no place in a dating show, but 24/7 pod live streams? Yes, please. From couples that get engaged but don’t get invited on the post-pods getaway to all the quintessential drama that’s not caught on tape (we’re looking at you, Ben Mezzenga), way too much of Love Is Blind happens off-camera. We know we’d (probably) never get a Pod Squad live stream, but can they at least film everything and decide what to cut after?
10. Love Is Blind: Hometown Edition
Hometown gossip is, perhaps, the earliest form of reality TV. In Love Is Blind Season 8, we saw just how small the Twin Cities’ singles community truly is. But let’s go even further. Give us a suburban town where everybody knows everybody’s business. In the spirit of all the times we’ve set our dating app distance to one mile to just see who’s home for the holidays, this season would bring together people who shared seats on the school bus and played on the same Little League team but haven’t spoken since high school. The twist? The location is a secret, so nobody knows they’ve all crossed paths before.
How would you shake things up in the Pods? Comment with your favorite Love Is Blind twist and share your own ideas below!
