What I Saw Inside the Love Is Blind Control Room
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 happening at once.
Little of what I saw from my perch in the control room made it into the final edit of Love Is Blind’s seventh season, largely due to a combination of structure and pure volume. Each season’s pods are filmed over 11 days, with ten days of actual dating, plus an extra day at the beginning for orientation and capturing establishing footage: the participants walking into the pods and filming their introductory interviews, and a clean take of Nick and Vanessa Lachey delivering their opening-lounge speeches. (This is no-brainer TV-production insurance — of course you want uninterrupted footage of the hosts — but as an outsider, watching the Lacheys warmly greet an empty lounge with cue cards propped on each chair was one of the funnier parts of the process.) There are hundreds of hours of footage from the pods alone, and a season of Love Is Blind is designed to follow the arcs of couples who’ve gotten engaged and been selected to continue onto a romantic getaway before testing their relationships in the “real world.” Many participants who don’t find mutual connections go home in the first few days of filming and are edited out almost entirely.
In watching the pods for three days at the beginning and another two and a half days at the end, I realized that some of the most compelling moments occur outside of the show’s relatively narrow structure. There were meetings between couples that did not happen on-camera because those couples decided to leave together rather than get engaged. Some moments fed too strongly into the participants’ constant awareness of being on a TV show; there were endless conversations in the lounges that speculated about the producers’ intentions — were the talking-head interviews scheduled in a specific order? Did it matter whose dates happened in the morning versus the evening? Then there’s the huge tranche of footage filled with little banalities, like the regular ritual of producers collecting participants for organized trips to the bathroom, or the small areas of the lounges that rarely appear onscreen because they’re lined with baskets of personal items. The cast arrives on set around 8 a.m., and filming can run until 10 p.m. or later without any real breaks, so participants have hours to burn in the lounges while they wait for their turn in the pods. These baskets are filled with all the things they need to make it through the day: medication, makeup for touch-ups, books, a change of clothes, but no phones or internet-connected devices.
One scene that stuck with me happened after the first full day of filming. There are ten pods, but the season begins with approximately 15 women and 15 men, so the lounge always has a collection of people sitting around, waiting for their turn. Several of the women began comparing notes about which men they liked and who seemed unimpressive. They quickly realized their worst interactions had been with a guy named Jason Drecchio, who’d been rude and off-putting on multiple dates. The women started to believe he was there to create tension rather than present himself as a legitimate potential marriage partner. (As far as I could tell, Jason was not a plant.) By the end of day two, I watched as the Jason-fueled anger grew louder and louder inside the women’s lounge. Finally, one woman promised that the next time she went on a date with Jason, she’d give it to him straight. True to her word, she arrived at their next date like an appointed representative for the whole cast, listing off all the ways she’d heard he’d been rude to other women, explaining all of his faults, and suggesting he grow up before attempting to be in a serious relationship.
That woman was Hannah Jiles, who would go on to have a notably unenthusiastic reveal with Nick Dorka that would lay the groundwork for what would come later: a very similar breakup monologue about all the ways Nick was unready for a real relationship and all the things he needed to do to shape up. Did the earlier scene with Jason, who appeared only a handful of times in the final edit of the season, need to appear onscreen? Probably not! But in retrospect, it looks like a clear foreshadowing of how Hannah saw her role in a relationship and the pleasure she took in confronting Jason (and later Nick) with all the evidence of her disappointment. What struck me about the confrontation at the time was not just Hannah’s confidence in laying out all of Jason’s perceived misdeeds, but her sense of righteousness in taking on this task for the sake of the group. She ultimately marched out of the pod before the date ended, and I watched the women all gather to discuss her victorious smackdown of this guy they disliked. On the other side of the soundstage, Jason walked calmly back to the men’s lounge, said nothing, and went home the next day.
I happened to overhear the Hannah-Jason confrontation because I’d been listening to some of the lounge conversations and picked up the growing anti-Jason sentiment. Somewhere behind me, or off in a secondary control room designated for the lower-level story producers, there were certainly people tracking Hannah’s soapbox tirade. From the eagle’s-eye view of the main control room, though, it was surprisingly easy to miss. For any one date you listen to live, there are nine others you’re missing. Leo Braudy, one of the season’s primary villains in the early episodes, was barely on my radar the first few days. When I returned to watch the end of the pods, I was surprised to hear that he and Brittany Wisniewski were getting engaged because I’d ignored them in favor of listening to dates between Tyler Francis and Ashley Adionser, who went on to say yes at the altar, and Bohdan Olinares and Nina Zafar, two participants who make only minor appearances this season.
Bohdan, who is depicted dating Marissa George in the pods, and Nina, who was one of a set of sisters in the cast, were the couple I found most compelling. She was uncertain about what she wanted, she told him, and never fully felt comfortable with being on-camera. On the last day of dating before the engagements — producers carefully told the participants that they were allowed to get engaged at any point during production, but they should really wait until the ninth day so producers could film with additional camera operators from the best possible angles — Nina and Bohdan spent hours going back and forth about whether to leave. She was just not ready to be engaged, she said, even though she liked him very much. Bohdan, on the other hand, was all in on the show as a process, insisting there was no harm in trying the engagement to see if they could work.
Needless to say, their lengthy debate about whether to keep participating in the show did not appear in the edit, even though Bohdan’s relatively fraught breakup with Marissa a few days earlier did. As a rule, conversations about whether to continue participating do not appear on the show (an exception was made for season four’s Bliss Poureetezadi, who exited and later returned to production in the same season). After Nina decided to leave rather than get engaged, I watched Bohdan and Nina go back and forth in their final pod date about how to get each other’s numbers, where to meet up, and what they’d do together after they left production. The next morning, in a brief exit interview outside the soundstage, Bohdan explained to producers that he’d had a fantastic experience but wondered if Nina having a connection from home made it harder for her to fully embrace the pod experience. Nina’s sister Tara left on the same day, also with a guy she’d been dating in the pods, also without feeling ready to get engaged. In all, three couples left season seven without continuing production: Nina and Tara and their respective matches, and Brittany and Leo, who went through with a proposal and reveal but were not invited to the romantic getaway.
From the conversations I heard and the producers I spoke with, Brittany and Leo were not included on the Mexico honeymoon for the exact reason the season itself suggests. In the edit, Leo is presented as self-interested and money-obsessed, while Brittany seems to be going along with the process despite her obvious distaste for him. Based almost entirely on the proposal and reveal footage, executive producers Chris Coelen and Ally Simpson agreed that Brittany and Leo were the least genuine of the couples who’d gotten engaged, and in a choice that came down to keeping them or following Hannah and Nick, they went with the latter. As Coelen explained to me in interviews about this season, there are only enough camera crews to follow five couples during the Mexico getaway, or six if they really stretch. This was what drove the backstage conversations toward the end of pod filming: They had seven couples and, at most, enough crew to follow six of them. Given that reality, they were drawn to Hannah’s more explicit uncertainty about Nick, and they liked that while most couples were a little older, Hannah would represent a younger perspective.
But the most common topic of conversation on Love Is Blind rarely appears on the show. Everyone talks about being on Love Is Blind. They talk about who each other’s producers are, when they’ll go back to the hotel that night, and whether producers will allow them to go to Six Flags together in the two or three days between filming the reveals and flying to the romantic getaways. And they talk about how the show as a process pushes them toward a specific outcome. Although I later did many, many more hours of reporting on the show, including conversations with over 20 previous cast members, it didn’t change my fundamental impression of the Love Is Blind pods: There is no one producer pressuring the participants to behave in certain ways or make specific choices, but the show enacts those pressures anyhow. For participants who’ve made a connection, the promise of continuing to appear on the show nudges them toward commitment. Commitment to the show becomes a stand-in for commitment to a partner and can fill a lot of the gaps the partner relationship might lack (see: Hannah and Nick). The conditions of being in the pods are enough to push people into intimacy they might not otherwise feel.
Sometimes, that intimacy is the romantic love the show intends. But by the end of season seven’s pod period, the most intense feelings I witnessed seemed to be all the platonic relationships created in the lounges, particularly among the men. Leo regularly led everyone in something like a group pep talk, often in rhyme. Bohdan grinned or hugged or sympathized with his castmates as needed. Participants end up bonded to one another because they’re all sitting together in the lounges, being watched by dozens of producers (and, for a short period, me), experiencing something they can’t talk about with anyone besides each other. What else are they going to do?
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