Lauren and Cameron, Love Is Blind’s breakout stars, have succeeded not because of the show but in spite of it.
In the first season of Netflix’s hit reality show Love Is Blind, Lauren Speed visits the Atlanta home of her new fiancé, Cameron Hamilton. The house is airy and bright, and Lauren and Cameron, fingers laced, wander the rooms imagining the life they might have there together. But behind the scenes, that day was less dreamy than it looked.
A producer urged Lauren to peek inside Cameron’s fridge and pantry so the crew could film her commenting on what she saw inside. They seemed particularly eager for her to note a few specific items: watermelon, collard greens, and Kool-Aid. “They didn’t want to let up,” Cameron told me. “I was frustrated because these are basic items, and why even perpetuate these notions?” This wasn’t the first time the show had tried to gin up racial tension. During the couple’s onscreen courtship, Lauren told me, producers “really, really pressed down hard on the fact that You’re a Black woman from Detroit; he’s a white man from Maine—talk about it, talk about it, talk about it.”
Love Is Blind, which premiered in February 2020 and will air its third season later this year, presents itself as both comfortably familiar reality fare and a radical treatise on the barriers to love in a screen-mediated, swipe-happy dating world. Single men and women occupy separate pods and converse through an opaque, glowing wall: the show’s test of whether two people can fall for each other without the interference of superficial factors. After 10 days, they must decide whether to part ways or get married. Only then are the newly engaged couples allowed to meet face-to-face, before enduring some rapid-fire bonding rituals: a beach vacation, tours of their homes, a round of meet-the-parents—all in preparation for their wedding, scheduled for four weeks later.