If you frequently find yourself crying out: “Damn my hunky appearance! And damn all these sexy flibbertigibbets who just want me for my chiselled abs and my perfectly symmetrical features. Oh, how I wish they could see the beautiful thoughts inside my meaty noggin and love me for who I am, a cerebral hunk of the mind, and not how I appear, a sensual hunk of the flesh” then Netflix’s Love Is Blind is probably the show for you.
In this programme, bathed and manicured gentlemen and ladies from the US’s fading professional classes enter “pods” to pitch woo via a gently glowing window of opaque glass, before eventually proposing marriage sight unseen to one of the fuzzy shapes beyond. Often they claim they are following this path because, like many Irish Times readers, their beauty is distracting to potential suitors, and not, as is the case with Irish Independent readers, because they have goggling eyes on stalks or tusks or resemble one of the more freakish Mr Men.
Netflix has been stress-testing straight marriage with this format for three seasons and I reckon the jig is almost up. The endtimes for state-sanctioned heterosexuality are overseen by Vanessa and Nick Lachey, two celebri-hunks carved carefully from the finest ham and cheese. They have lived the majority of their long lives in the cursed backrooms of reality television and their qualification for this job is that they have been married for longer than a few seasons of the show. In contemporary TV terms this makes them akin to Ma and Pa Walton or Tom and Mrs Bombadil or Arthur from Minder and Her Indoors.
They are terrifying. “The pods are now open,” cries Vanessa Lachey early on, which is the sort of thing you might hear in a 1970s sci-fi film about an imagined dystopian 2022 but is, sadly, something you are hearing now in actual dystopian 2022.
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‘I see us having amazing sex, and hot babies but being poor,’ he says, sadly and deeply
We gaze at the various hunks in their gender segregated windowless rooms drinking booze from golden goblets. As always, they have the kinds of abstract jobs that scream “end-stage capitalism”, jobs that few dream of becoming and children can’t draw: “medical devices salesperson”, “data analyst” and “VP of aerospace manufacturing”.
My favourite hunk is Cole, a self-confidently picky real estate agent and hunk in need of a hunk wife. He says what he thinks. When one of his dates in the “pod” reveals that she works as a critical care nurse he says, aloud, “Oh no!”. He explains: “I don’t do nurses” — which is a refreshing position to take. Finally, someone is saying it! Nurses! They think they’re so great, healing the sick and comforting the dying. And children can draw them. How did she even get on this show with a job like that?
Brennon talks about leaner times in his past, but suggests he has more money now, more beans, more dough, more… bread. Yes, Brennon has today’s bread today
Cole goes on to show he’s not just a pretty face by asking women deep questions like the ones the classical philosophers asked. For example: “Who would win in a fight between a bear and a gorilla?” a prompt you might recall from Bear vs Gorilla? The Eternal Question, by Aristotle. Like Aristotle, he answers his own question at length, discussing the various combat qualities of each animal (jaws, musculature, charisma). Many women find his evocation of bestial combat charming. But only one woman has a name that reminds Cole of his own. Her name is Colleen and so he is instantly drawn to her.
Colleen is fascinating for her own reasons, mainly because she bristles at the idea of “deep” conversation. Pshaw to that! She wants to marry someone she hardly knows very quickly, like in the olden days. She frets that this makes her “shallow”. It possibly does. Cole is not shallow, as you’ve probably already gathered, he is “deep” and so sees no future with his near namesake. “I see us having amazing sex, and hot babies but being poor,” he says, sadly and deeply.
He finds a more suitable partner in flight attendant Zanab. “You should absolutely know I love the outdoors,” he tells her. “You should absolutely know that I love God,” he adds (I’m sure God noted the order here, though, going by the Bible, God’s pretty chill and not at all vengefully sensitive).
“Also massively love God!” says Zanab cheerfully, as though it’s a delightful coincidence that they know the same people.
By the end of the first episode at least one other couple is closer to reality TV matrimony. Brennon, a sales manager with a misspelled name, proposes to Alexa, an insurance manager and/or digital appliance. I like them both. Alexa is a plucky individualist and Amazon product. Brennon talks about leaner times in his past, but suggests he has more money now, more beans, more dough, more… bread. Yes, Brennon has today’s bread today.
Look, I’ve watched far too much Love Is Blind to pay attention to the actual dynamics of the show. After this first episode, for example, I’m largely obsessed with one throwaway line. It’s when a pleasant 25-year-old accountant reveals to a Pilates instructor that he is named after a family friend who “died on a motorcycle or something” (my italics). The lack of clarity in this sentence haunts me. What does it mean? The specificity of “a motorcycle” followed by the vagueness of “or something” is casually, almost poetically, chilling. It sits there like a memento mori amid the lighthearted dating show banter. In the future, will my death be spoken of on a reality TV dating show in similarly vague and inconclusive terms? Probably. “Uncle Patrick? He died in a surprise bee attack or something. Yeah, to be honest I don’t know what happened there. I wasn’t paying attention. TLDR #yolo.”
The sombre mood that line put me in is quite similar to the one I get watching my new favourite Star Wars property, Andor (Disney+) from showrunner Tony Gilroy. Eight episodes in and it’s managed to inject the formerly cartoonish Star Wars imperium with petty office politics, kitchen-sink realism and postcolonial class analysis. I suddenly find myself having strong feelings about politics (of Star Wars) and might even pen some political analysis pieces (about Star Wars) for the Irish Times opinion pages (“Say what you like about Emperor Palpatine, but he gets things done!”) if that’s a direction the editor wants to take things. Andor features no CGI-chewing villains and no spotless heroes. Every character and every set feels lived in. It’s ridiculously grounded for a Star Wars show. It’s basically a step towards Mike Leigh’s Star Wars and the complete dominance of Disney over all culture creation. I can’t even tell any more if that’s an exciting or terrible prospect.
