‘Love Is Blind’: How Creator Chris Coelen Came up With the Pods

Love Is Blind creator Chris Coelen took a careful approach when developing the show, from its casting to its design. One of the most unique aspects of the reality series might be the pods contestants find themselves in. Coelen once described his thought process when coming up with the idea.

Chris Coelen nixed an early version of the ‘Love Is Blind’ pods

Some of the most interesting moments in Love Is Blind happen in the pods. Audiences have seen contestants develop strong bonds with each other in these cozy rooms. It helps the series live up to its premise, as there’s usually a wall between the two pairings to keep them from seeing each other. 

In an interview with Decider, Coelen assured that the pods are built exactly how they come across on TV. However, when he first developed the series, he thought about adding another cool effect to the pods.

“They are really on the other end. That’s always been the intention, that moving wall. I remember thinking [in the design phase], ‘It should be something where you can kind of see the shadow, or distorted shadow, behind the wall. Would that be cool?’ And then we felt like, no, that might give too much away in terms of size, shape, motion, or whatever,” Coelen said.

Despite contestants being unable to see each other for 10 days, Coelen still wanted the pods to carry a sense of intimacy. And he took steps to make sure that happened.

“But you want to feel like there’s a living, warm thing being a person over on the other side,” Coelen added. “So the wall is directly in the direction of where the other person is, and they’re looking basically at a mirror image of that on the other side. And there are speakers that are alongside the moving wall, so the sound is coming from out there. They’re not fully soundproof, the pods. So if somebody screamed, you can hear them in a muffled way. But if you’re just talking in a normal voice, you can’t hear anything.”

Why Chris Coelen wanted to evolve the pods

It was noted that the pods used to be much simpler in earlier seasons. Most of the time, contestants were just seen talking to their potential partners while living in the pods. But as the series continued, the pods allowed for more recreational activity to simulate dates. In its latest seasons, contestants were shown sharing gifts with each other. They were also able to eat dinner and sketch drawings.

But Coelen shared the show’s always been like that to an extent. They’ve just been very careful about what moments to air on the show.

“We’ve actually done exactly the same thing in every season,” he said. “We’ve always had a day where we put games in, and we’ve always told them to think of the dates as real dating in the outside world. And if they have ideas, like, ‘Let’s play mini golf’ or whatever, you can do anything you do on a real date — except see each other and touch each other. But you can order in Chinese food. We encourage them to think of those things, and sometimes they make it on the show and sometimes they don’t. They spend so much time in the pods together that we pick out moments that you think reflect the essence of their experience. There’s only so much time you have on the show to convey that.”

But Coelen noted there was a recent change that he was excited to implement more of.

“The one thing that we changed, and it’s really more of an evolution, but for a while we’ve had what is called silent disco. You can you can put on headphones and they have a playlist and you can play this music. It can be very bonding for people, what music they like. We’ve never really shown too much of that on the show, but we really enjoy it. And we originally had it in just one day and because people liked it so much, we’ve actually expanded out to have it across three days, if they want to access it,” he said.

Where do the ‘Love Is Blind’ contestants sleep?

Love Is Blind never shows where the contestants get their shut-eye. But Coelen assured that the show’s cast members are given warm, cozy places to spend their nights in. Although Coelen felt figuring that out also took a bit of a process.

“They were filming The Avengers at the same time we were filming. We were on the bigger stage,” he said. “It’s just gigantic, like 60,0000 square feet of facility. We thought in season 1 we also wanted to have their sleeping quarters here, at the pods. So in season 1, the intention was that we would have those built out and we were running behind on construction. We were desperately trying to finish the sleeping quarters by the end of the night, but we couldn’t get it done.”

Coelen then tried to have the Love Is Blind contestants rest in sleeper vans. When that didn’t work out, he figured that a simple hotel would do.

“And on day two in the morning, one or two people were like, ‘This isn’t comfortable.’ One person was like, ‘I saw a cockroach.’ And, so I said, ‘We’re gonna get rid of these’ and we were like, alright, they don’t need to sleep here,” he said. “We got them all their own private individual hotel rooms, because it’s not really relevant where they sleep. The men and women have different hotels. During the day, whenever they want to go back to their hotel room, they can, and have a warm shower or a warm bed and sleep in their own room. That’s what we’ve done since day two in season 1.”