Love Is Blind: DC sadly doesn’t feel like DC 

While Virginia is reportedly for lovers, most everyone acknowledges that nearby Washington, DC, is not. The nation’s capital has been consistently ranked as one of the worst places to date and one of the US’s worst cities for singles. Too many type As, too many people too into their jobs, too many people ready to leave after two years — it’s not exactly a city that screams romance. They say that politics is show business for ugly people, which would make DC the Hollywood of uggos.

Given Washington’s notoriety, it was only a matter of time before Netflix took Love Is Blind to the nation’s capital.

In its first season, the Netflix reality dating series asserted the hopefulness of romance — the possibility of falling in love with someone sight unseen and marrying them within a month — but it has become a show about irreparable incompatibility featuring terrifying tales of red flag-waving monsters. There have also been lawsuits from contestants alleging toxic and inhospitable workplace environments in and out of the “pods.” Yet the love experiment is one of Netflix’s biggest hits, and each season a captive audience tunes in to see a new batch of daters and the horrors — body shaming, weaponized therapy speak, flies in toilets — that await them on the other side of the wall.

Now we have what sounds like a perfect, hellish match: one of the worst dating cities in the US, combined with one of the bleakest reality TV dating shows in history. On paper, it feels more like a dare or taunt, a gift to haters. Truly only the freakiest freaks, some real District of Columbia sickos would sign up to be on Love Is Blind: DC.

But while this immensely watchable season has plenty of villains and inter-crossing love triangles, it, sadly, doesn’t feel very DC.

For one thing, no one on this season explicitly works in government. To be fair, the show isn’t very specific when it comes to its participants’ professions, so an “IT specialist” could ostensibly be working for some military government contractor and an “engineer” could be doing research for, say, Lockheed-Martin. Still, the closest we get is a cast member being described as a “policy advocate,” which seems like a nice euphemism for lobbyist.

Capitol Hill keeping their employees from representing on Love Is Blind is understandable because of how embarrassingly and negatively many of the participants are portrayed. But that dynamic of an adjacency to national political power fueling a person’s dating identity is exactly what makes DC dating unique and (from all these news stories about people who hate dating there) so hostile. That the show spent a season in DC and couldn’t capture the snobbiness of a staffer asking “Who do you work for?” feels like a loss.

There seems to be a reluctance to get into politics this season, too. A contestant talks about how he voted in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and there’s a conversation about what kind of political beliefs one has while serving in the military, but politics as they relate to dating preferences — e.g., whether love trumps politics, whether similar politics mean compatibility, etc. — is barely addressed. That’s a missed opportunity, not only given how politically active DC allegedly is, but also because finding partners who share the same politics has increasingly become more and more important to singles.

That said, there’s still enough relationship dysfunction this season to sustain its horror-junkie audience.

Brittany, a beautiful woman who wants to be a trophy wife and tells the camera she cannot spell the word “physicist,” falls for Leo, a young art dealer who tells everyone that one of his insecurities is that he inherited a humongous amount of money and never has to worry about anything financially. The more the audience gets to know Leo, the more it seems like this isn’t an insecurity at all. The more Brittany gets to know Leo, the more interested she is in his “insecurity.”

There’s also Hannah, a 26-year-old woman who quit her “dream job” to be on the show. The dream job in question? Medical device sales. Perhaps there is honor and allure in, say, the vending of CPAP machine accessories, but she’s given it all up for the possibility of sight-unseen reality TV love. To that end, she tells Nick, one of her pod suitors, that she dates athletes and she’s always worried that men only see her as a hot girl. Nick tells her he looks like a less buff Henry Cavill. Neither is setting themselves up to overdeliver.

Hannah, Nick, Leo, Brittany and their cohort deliver a season draped in red flags and dealbreakers. From chilling fights about yapping too much to roundabout conversations about getting the ick from watching your partner straddle patio furniture, there’s plenty here. If you’re coupled, they’ll make you breathe a sigh of relief that you’re not in the dating pool. If you’re single, they’ll make you relish it.

Love Is Blind is still a riveting, deranged exploration of the worst people falling in and out of love, even if it doesn’t feel like DC.

This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.