Season 9 of Love Is Blind features 32 singles — 16 men and 16 women — from the Denver area, but of course they all start in the pods set up on a Los Angeles soundstage. You know the drill here; the couples meet each other through the walls of the pods, not being able to see each other. Over the ten days they’re in the pods, some of the daters will form a strong enough bond that they’ll get engaged. Then the engaged couples will go on a trip to a resort, then test their coupling back home in Denver as they plan their weddings, which will be in a few weeks. Finally, at the weddings, each member of each couple get to choose whether to say “I do” or walk away.
Opening Shot: This season Love Is Blind is using imagery of the show’s signature golden goblets, so we see two of them up close as the opening strains of The Honeydrippers’ version of “Sea Of Love” play. Then we see a montage of Season 9 scenes.
The Gist: We get to see a few couples gel in the first episode, most notably Anton and Ali, who bond over the fact that they both emigrated to the US with their families. Megan W, who calls herself “Sparkle Megan”, ends up vibing with both Jordan, who has a 5-year-old son and teases the entrepreneur that he drives a Kia, and Mike, who is likely more her speed, career-wise.
Anna and Patrick seem to have some chemistry; both are Asian but they tell each other that they’ve only dated white people because, you know, Colorado. Edmond and Kalybriah definitely have chemistry, though when Edmond talks about being in the foster system but having a 5th grade teacher who changed his life, he starts sobbing. Then Kalybriah feels more like his therapist than a future spouse.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Love Is Blind Seasons 1-8.
Our Take: Perhaps we’ve been conditioned by past seasons, but we were waiting for something controversial to happen in the first episode of LIB‘s ninth season, and we were actually disappointed when all we got were people getting to know each other. We’re not sure if that’s just an “us” problem or because showrunner Chris Coelen and his crew at Kinetic Content have leaned into the scandalous so many times over the years.
It could also be because we know too much about how this show is made, thanks to all of the lawsuits filed against the show and Kinetic, plus all of the former daters who have YouTube, TikTok and Instagram feeds full of BTS material. The longer we watch the show, the more cynical we get about how these relationships that are created in the pods are fostered.
For the first time in a few seasons, for instance, we get a couple that’s so bonded so quickly that there’s an engagement before the first episode is over. In past seasons, we were a little more credulous about this process, thinking that the couple actually did get engaged before the ten-day pod period was over. But now we’re not so sure; after all, how could you even consider getting engaged to someone after only a couple of days of conversations, even if they’re hours long? We can sort of buy the idea that the two of them would fall in love with each other after talking to each other for hours on end for ten days straight.
Then again, the whole idea that, even after that ten days of talking to each other, you’d get engaged to that person on the other side of the wall still seems strange to us. Yes, the producers are trying to prove that you can fall in love by just talking and bonding, but it feels more than ever that the participants feel that pressure and might pull the trigger on an engagement before they’re really sure they should be doing it.
It definitely feels like the producers have really narrowed down on a few combinations of people in the first episode. We hope we get some glimpses of other couplings in the next couple of episodes, but when we went over the list of participants to use as a reference for this review, we didn’t recognize more of them then we have at a similar stage of past seasons. That’s generally not a good sign that the season will be at all interesting, despite some of what we saw during the opening montage.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode. It seems that the participants this season have more tattoos than in past seasons.
Parting Shot: We’re about to see the reveal of the first couple that gets engaged.
Sleeper Star: Madison, who connects with Joe in the first episode, is literally going blind, so to her, dating this way might become a way of life when her vision finally fails. Perhaps she and Joe will bond to the point where she won’t be dating anymore.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Nick and Vanessa Lachey show up in the men’s and women’s quarters at the beginning of the first episode, they said basically the same spiel they say at the beginning of every season. We still don’t get why they need to be there, especially this far into the show’s run.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While we recommend Love As Blind as we have for every season it’s been on, we might be done with the show at this point. The first episode of Season 9 really bored us to tears, and we just get the feeling that we’ve seen too much of how the sausage is made to get invested in the couples that actually make it out of the pods together.
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.