By Emily Riley
Two University of Maryland students are bringing Netflix’s hit reality television show to close to home.
“Love is Blind,” the original show, pushed contestants to explore deeper relationships by placing them in separate pods. This gave them the chance to talk with each other and decide whether or not to continue the relationship, without ever seeing what the other person looked like. The UMD version, aptly titled “UMD is Blind,” is basically the same concept.
The show will be hosted on Instagram Live, on their page @umdisblind. Applications opened for a couple weeks until May 17 and drew in over 30 possible contestants for the show. In their application, people were required to submit a short video showing off their personality and answer some basic questions like what grade they are in, why they want to participate and what gender they would prefer to be matched up with. Once the ‘show’ starts, contestants will get the chance to speak with the other contestants in Zoom with their camera turned off, and then have the chance to rank each other based on how their conversations went.
The show’s content will be screen recorded and posted on the UMD is Blind Instagram page. Once they start the show, contestants will be blocked from the Instagram page so they can’t see who they were talking to. By the final night, contestants will be able to see each other and decide whether or not they want to continue getting to know one another.
The students who created the account, made the application and are producing the content are rising juniors at UMD. But for now, they are choosing to remain anonymous. Just like contestants, the two UMD students who created UMD is Blind will remain faceless until the show finishes and they release a reunion episode, in order to “create some more mystery and buzz.”
Although the producers saw the potential for good couples from applicants’ video submissions, they are choosing to not interfere.
“We don’t want to manipulate the show– that’s why we’re letting everyone talk to each other on the first night,” they said. “We are simply picking people with interesting and dynamic personalities, letting them talk and seeing what happens.”
Although seeing real couples emerge from UMD is Blind isn’t the student producers’ main goal, they expressed that it would be extremely fulfilling.
“Our ultimate goal,” they said, “is to bring a group of people together that will be friends after the show is over. All of the contestants have different backgrounds, friends, majors, sororities, fraternities, hobbies, interests, etc. These things often limit the types of people we are able to meet on campus. Now that we’re all home, we might as well expand our horizons.”
Although there have been previous online ‘matching’ sites such as Terpmatch created for UMD students, the creators of the UMD is Blind account were inspired by UMBC is Blind, which was produced from the end of March to the beginning of April this year.
Creating “UMD is Blind” was important to the creators because of how dramatic of a change the semester turned out to be. “We felt like our semester was stolen from us and we wanted a chance to expand our circles,” the producers said. With finals being over, “we’ll all be sitting at home and everyone needs something fun to do. Whether they are watching Season One or participating in it, we know Terps everywhere will have a blast.”
The show is set to start May 22.
Featured photo courtesy of Emily Riley.