Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love Is Blind’ Season 6 On Netflix, Where Singles From Charlotte Try To Fall In Love Without Seeing The Other Person

Love Is Blind‘s disastrous fifth season, where only one of the couples that got engaged ended up getting married (and one of the engaged couples wasn’t even shown, for a number of shocking reasons) leaned heavily on Real Housewives-type drama, with people having arguments at parties and scenes where the couples are shown in ways that convinced viewers that those couples were doomed. Would the sixth season continue to push that aspect of the series or go back to the more couples-trying-to-get-along formula from its first four seasons?

LOVE IS BLIND SEASON 6: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes from Season 6 of Love Is Blind.

The Gist: Season 6 of Love Is Blind features singles from Charlotte, North Carolina, but as we all know by now, they start the season on a soundstage in Los Angeles, with men and women meeting through the walls of pods. After the obligatory intro where Vanessa and Nick Lachey pop into the men’s and women’s quarters to give their now well-worn speech about what the show is about, the dates begin.

After a quick montage, we start focusing in on a few people. Right away, Amy and Johnny seem to connect right away, and Chelsea seems to have the attention of both Trevor and Jimmy. One of the stranger contestants we’ve ever seen is Matthew, who goes into each initial date with a list of fifteen questions, asks the woman in the other pod to pick one, then asks the question. He’s actually taken by surprise when one of the women ask him what his response to that question would be.

Matthew admits that it’s tough for him to open up, but AD — short for Amber Desiree — manages to do just that. Over the course of their dates, he opens up and says things like “my biggest accomplishment was finding you.” At a certain point, he even says to her that he would have liked to ask her father, who passed away the previous year, for his blessing before proposing.

For her part, AD is enraptured by Matthew, thinking he’s being truthful and real. She’s also interested in Clay, who is a more sensitive version of the guys she usually dates. AD really wants to leave superficiality out of the pods, and she’s taken by surprise when Clay talks about his need to be physically attracted to someone, despite the connection they made in the pods. So when she goes to Matthew and he says all of the things he says, he vaults to the top of her list. That is, until she hears another Amber talk about her date with Matthew back in the women’s quarters.

Meanwhile, Jessica, the first LIB contestant we know of that has a child — a ten-year-old daughter — knows she has to tell Johnny about her daughter, and while he’s thrown for a bit of a loop, the interaction seems positive. When Chelsea drops her bomb to Johnny — that she was married for five years — he seems to have a similar reaction, but she takes it much differently than Jessica did.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Love Is Blind, Seasons 1-5.

Our Take: We wondered whether the aforementioned Season 5 ugliness was just a case of the producers going with what they were given, or if this signaled a not-so-subtle change in direction by Chris Coelen and the folks at Kinetic Content. Yes, they want to push the romantic angle of the show, with the notion that the contestants coming in are still open to the possibilities of finding their forever person in the pods, despite the show now being on long enough for the contestants to have watched and know what to expect. But, now that the newness of the concept is gone, we really wonder if they look to push conflict early and often, and put it right alongside the romantic stuff.

Case in point: AD and Matthew. Once we saw the cameras following Matthew from awkward date to awkward date, and seeing a side interview with him about how closed off he is, we said to ourselves, “someone’s going to open him up.” That person ended up being AD, and we were heartened by seeing them get along so well, given that he’s a shy white country guy and she’s an outgoing Black woman who grew up in Boston. She brings up race and ethnicity during one of their dates and he says it doesn’t matter. It’s all setting up as just the kind of matchup that the show was designed to feature.

But then we get that ending, where AD finds out Matthew’s true colors. To this point, we haven’t seen him talking to anyone else but AD, so it’s a surprise when Amber pops up to start discussing her time with him. Up until this point, the show’s producers liked to show when someone was vibing hard with more than one suitor, because love triangles and hard decisions were the driver of most of the drama in the pods. But this time, we had no idea that this was going on; the producers purposely held Matthew and Amber back in order to surprise us at the end of the first episode.

This tells us that they took some lessons from Season 4, which had some pod squad mean-girl drama, and Season 5, which featured two people holding back info that they dated each other before joining the show, and are applying it so Season 6. To them, pod drama of the kind that we see with AD and Matthew is far better than love triangles or a couple forging a deep connection only to get waylaid by one member — usually the guy — saying something stupid.

Of course, this is the more salacious way to go, and it does shake up the pod section of the season, which tends to get stale with all the eye-rolling lovey-doveiness. But it also gets the show away from its original mission, which is to bring couples like AD and Matthew together because they connected through that wall sight unseen (the Platonic ideal of that concept, of course, is Season 1’s Lauren Speed and Cameron Hamilton, who have now been married for almost six years).

Sex and Skin: Not as much sex talk in the pods, at least in the parts we were shown, as we saw in Season 5.

Parting Shot: AD finds out what Matthew said to Amber during their dates and she is understandably pissed off.

Sleeper Star: Last season, we gave the sleeper to Carter, whom we ended up being very, very wrong about. This time, we’re going to tentatively give the title to Trevor, who openly admitted that he likes romantic movies like The Notebook.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not sure why Jessica put on such a nasally voice during her first few dates with Jimmy; she even talked about how people think she sounded like Fran Drescher. When things got serious, the nasal tone was gone. Is it nerves that make people do that?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The sixth season of Love Is Blind introduces us to some potentially solid couples, but it brings the drama almost immediately, which may or may not be something that longtime fans of the show will enjoy.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.