The main Love Is Blind control room, a large space off to one side of the show’s enormous soundstage, has several rows of tables lined with individual monitors, snaking audio cords taped across the floor, and a large screen in the corner displaying the day’s production schedule, often in the form of a color-coded grid indicating which couple is scheduled to be in which pod during each of a dozen time slots throughout the day. A whiteboard on one side of the room features a magnetized photo of each participant that will be moved around throughout the ten days of pod filming to reflect, in real time, who is dating whom, who exited production, and how each pairing overlaps or intersects with the other participants. As a part of my reporting for a big story on Love Is Blind , I sat in that control room for five and a half days, staring at the room’s biggest and most visible feature: the wall-size bank of monitors displaying every date in every pod, as well as two interview rooms and both lounges.
Love Is Blind is designed to allow the viewer to listen in on intimate conversations between people as they fall in love or unravel. Toggling back and forth between ten simultaneous pod dates in the control room, though, is like standing in front of a firehose of gossip. There are a phalanx of producers also listening in, many of them assigned to follow specific participants so they’re not missing key moments in developing relationships.
But there’s no way to track everything h.