A newbie's guide to the Twin Cities' new "Love is Blind" season
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"Love Is Blind," Season 8. Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
👋 Kyle here. I'm not the biggest fan of dating shows, but I am a huge fan of Minnesota being in the national spotlight.
Driving the news: Enter "Love Is Blind," the Netflix reality series whose latest season is set in the Twin Cities and premieres Friday — and I, a dating show newbie, got a sneak preview.
Why it matters: Hollywood has a chance to correct the injustice of jilting too many Minnesotans on the altar of a nationally broadcast dating show. (Side-eyeing you, "Bachelor" franchise.)
Catch up quick: The show puts men and women into separate "pods" that allow them to talk to their dates without seeing them.
- Once they find a match — and get engaged — they move into a Minneapolis apartment to test their connection in the real world before deciding whether to marry in the season finale.
💭 My thought bubble: I came in skeptical about the show's premise. By now, participants surely know their date in the opposite pod is, at bare minimum, cute.
- I was dubious that the show was a subversive "experiment," as it calls itself: one that involved participants who broke the mold of conventional beauty, that might truly test whether love is blind.
- I mean, look at this collection of contestants!
Inside the pods: Show host Vanessa Lachey told Insider in 2022 the show has cast plus-size people, but they haven't made meaningful connections in the pods.
- Glamour argued those remarks had a fatphobic subtext. Also: c'mon. Surely there's at least one more bald dude in Minnesota they could've cast!
The other side: Hot people suffer, too.
- No spoilers, but the show's "blind dating" aspect generated more dramatic moments than I expected.
- Participants also share how meaningful it is to enter a new relationship knowing their connection is emotional before it's ever physical.
The intrigue: The show is billed as an experiment in blind dating, but I actually thought the pods were a fascinating experiment with the complexities of dating multiple partners at once.
- As anyone who's ever been on the dating apps knows, it's a feature of the Tinder age.
What we're watching: What real-life Twin Cities locations end up onscreen.
- We know for sure that contestants lived in a high-rise apartment off Nicollet Mall, and wound up at St. Paul's BlackStack Brewing and Como Park's conservatory.
😍 The bottom line: The real star of this show is our smoke-show of a state.