(Un)Scripting the Soap: The Ethics of Endless Transmedia Labor on Love is Blind

Soap operas and reality TV both characteristically include a cast of heroes and villains who engage in serial melodramatic confrontations and perform key steps in heterosexual courtship. Lawsuits and tell-alls about Netflix reality TV dating show Love is Blind offer a unique window into damaging behind-the-scenes practices common across the industry designed to extract these intense emotional performances from the amateur cast. Such practices include ideological factors that constitute the Love is Blind “magic circle,” which normalizes the show’s rapid courtship process. However, producers also allegedly cast volatile people, withhold food, water, and sleep, and coerce participants’ compliance via NDAs and large monetary penalties, leading to extreme cases of sexual violence. Further, transmedia storytelling dramatically extends the temporality of participants’ labor. Consequently, the tactics that produce performances of “real” love and heartbreak familiar from soap conventions also create harmful working conditions that require both labor organization and ethical reflection.