Love Is Blind Season 8 boasts the show’s largest cast ever, but also its least racially diverse. When the Minneapolis-based season debuted on Feb. 14, viewers immediately called out how the cast members given screen time were overwhelmingly white. This is a notable shift from past seasons, and creator Chris Coelen responded to the backlash shortly after the premiere.
“Well, the show casts itself,” Coelen told Entertainment Weekly. “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].”
EW reported that only about 30% of Season 8’s cast are non-white people, as compared to about 50% in the seven seasons prior.
The homogeneity led to many social media users complaining about not being able to tell several daters apart, particularly the central group of brunette white men heavily featured in the pods.
The glaring lack of diversity became especially blatant when the topic of Black Lives Matter came up midway through the pods. Sara Carton asked her potential partner Ben Mezzenga his thoughts on George Floyd’s murder — an especially relevant question given the season’s Minneapolis setting. “I’m not one way or another. I just keep out of it,” Ben responded, also admitting he’s “ignorant” of political issues and didn’t vote in the 2020 election.
Coelen stated that while the show attempts to build a diverse cast, the cameras will always follow whichever couples build the strongest connections.
“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,” Coelen 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.”
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