Nine months into the pandemic, Nick Thompson, a marketer at a tech firm in Chicago, got a message on LinkedIn inviting him to apply to be a contestant on a Netflix reality show called “Love Is Blind.” Thompson, a Midwesterner with bright-blue eyes and a sheepish smile, didn’t watch much reality TV, although he’d caught a bit of “The Bachelor” so that he could join a betting bracket at his office. He was more of a fan of W.W.E. wrestling, so much so that he’d once trained to become a wrestler himself. “For, like, a day,” he said, laughing—he’d busted his ankle, then quit.
The format of “Love Is Blind” sounded outlandish: fifteen men and fifteen women were gathered in Los Angeles, where they were ensconced in individual “pods” and flirted with strangers through a wall. After just a few days of speed courtship, contestants fell in love and, amazingly, some got engaged, sight unseen. The show’s producers, who worked for a company called Kinetic Content, emphasized that “Love Is Blind,” despite its premise, wasn’t some sleazy guilty pleasure like “Temptation Island.” It was a sincere experiment in human intimacy—participants were placed on a “digital fast” designed to liberate them from all distractions, including physical appearance, so that they could form a deeper, more lasting bond with a partner. The producers weren’t looking for clout-chasers but for emotionally mature adults, people who were ready to commit to marriage, for real.
Thompson, a psychology and self-help buff, was tantalized by the concept. By the time he was cast—after background checks, months of interviews, and an online psychological test—he’d seen Season 1, and he loved it. Contestants were secluded in cozy mini living rooms with sofas and nap blankets, a bit like the bottle in “I Dream of Jeannie.” Between dating segments, viewers got an intoxicating God’s-eye view of these “pods,” which were nested side by side, a golden honeycomb buzzing with romance. A few days in, participants became visibly infatuated, particularly that season’s breakout couple: Lauren, a warm, thoughtful Black model, and Cameron, a soft-spoken white scientist. After a dramatic “reveal,” in which pairs met face to face, those couples who had got engaged took a group vacation to Mexico, and, finally, returned to their shared home town. (In Season 1, everyone came from Atlanta.) The couples met each other’s families, lived together for several weeks, and planned weddings.
Not every couple ultimately said “I do,” but the few who did seemed convincingly smitten, and for Thompson, who was thirty-five, the show looked like a welcome break from the ugliness of dating apps. He considered himself a “low drama” person; he was proud of the stability that he’d achieved as the first member of his family to graduate from college. After carefully reviewing his contract with Kinetic, he set out to follow the producers’ mantra: “Trust the process.”
In Los Angeles, Thompson found the isolation startling—doing the show was less like being in a genie’s bottle than a casino, with no windows or wall clocks but lots of alcohol. For the first weekend, he was confined to a hotel room, forbidden to speak to other cast members, a status known as being “on ice.” Thompson’s phone was taken away; there was no Internet access. This was all part of the digital fast, he understood, but when the ten-day shoot inside the pods began, that Monday, the hours were shockingly long: the cast had to be camera-ready at 8 a.m. and didn’t return to their hotel rooms until 2 or 3 a.m. (Late-night dates were optional, but there were strong incentives to do them: if you failed to “make a connection” or the producers lost interest in your story, you could get cut.) Contestants were working for up to twenty consecutive hours. Each morning, producers gave them a journal to write in, along with a schedule of “dates” with other contestants and a list of questions to explore, with a theme for each day, such as sex or family. Sometimes they flirted in the pods as robotic cameras filmed them, and sipped drinks from the show’s trademark gold goblets; other times, they sat in a communal “lounge” set to film conversations with contestants of the same gender or met privately with producers for “on the fly” interviews. There were only a few breaks, including brief chances to use the bathroom and, once a day, a moment when the unionized members of the crew got swapped out.
And then Thompson fell in love. After a few light flirtations, he felt a serious spark with Danielle Ruhl, a twenty-nine-year-old associate marketing director. In his journal, he surrounded Ruhl’s name with hearts. When Thompson described those days to me, his voice grew dreamy: “We just had so much fun. Got deep about our family dynamics, all that stuff. Just listened, laughed, cried. . . . It was so genuinely not forced. And it kind of stayed that way, in the pods.”
On the ninth day, Thompson proposed to Ruhl. (In the final edit, it would look as if their engagement occurred days before any of the others; in fact, all the proposals were filmed on the same day.) He felt giddy, in a fog of romantic bliss. The couples were then sent to a resort in Cancún, for the vacation sequence, and things began to shift. In the pods, Ruhl had spoken to Thompson about her struggles with anxiety, something that she’d also discussed during casting. Now the couple was sharing a room, and the fog began burning off.
The first day at the resort, the shoot was delayed because of a covid outbreak, and the couple had fun, getting drunk, ordering room service, and swimming in a pool just outside their room. The next day, at 6 a.m., a team showed up to film a “makeout” scene in the shower. Thompson and Ruhl complied, somewhat reluctantly: intimate moments like this were built into the show, requiring awkward collaborations with the crew. Then Ruhl began vomiting, possibly from a stomach bug. Although she’d tested negative for covid, the producers refused to let her attend a “couples’ barbecue” that night—and they urged Thompson, who wanted to stay with her, to go by himself. After the event, he arrived at his hotel-room door, where the team surrounded him, ready to shoot: Ruhl was inside, and he was instructed to talk to her about the party, sitting as close as possible, since she wasn’t miked up.
Thompson had no idea that, in his absence, Ruhl had spiralled into a panic attack, the first she’d had since her teens, when she’d attempted suicide. “It felt like swords were swimming through my veins. My heart hurt,” she told me. “I lost my hearing—everything sounded like womp, womp, womp.” Desperate to escape the production, she downed a bottle of wine and locked herself in her closet, sobbing, paranoid that the room had hidden cameras. (A crew member confirmed Ruhl’s account of her distress.) She refused requests to put her microphone on, and later told her producer that she wanted to leave and felt like killing herself. (Kinetic has denied that Ruhl expressed suicidal thoughts to the production team, and says that it follows “rigorous protocols” to insure participants’ “wellbeing.”)
None of this wound up on the air. Instead, viewers saw the couple sitting stiffly on their bed, having a tense argument in which Ruhl moodily told her fiancé that she didn’t trust “anything right now.” What she was talking about, both parties agree, was her fear that the production team had been messing with them. Once Thompson realized that he’d been set up, he pulled his own microphone off and threw it. To viewers, however, it looked like a dramatic lovers’ spat: Ruhl was jealous of Thompson talking to other women at the barbecue.
Four years later—after the couple said “I do,” then appeared, apparently content, on a cast-reunion episode and an “After the Altar” special; after Ruhl filed for divorce, following months of struggle; after both participants were quoted in a Business Insider article about “Love Is Blind” that called the show “hell on earth”—Thompson kept thinking about that night in Cancún. If the producers thought that his fiancée might have covid, why didn’t they think he was at risk of spreading it, too? In retrospect, he wondered whether he and Ruhl had been separated to spark a conflict—then manipulated, rather than supported, during a scary mental-health crisis. Given the crispness of the sound quality in the version that aired, he even wondered if there had been microphones in the room after all. It was hard to tell what was real when you were inside the casino.
Thompson had come to see the show he’d once embraced in a new way. His romantic adventure now looked like a cruel trick, an unethical exercise in which the people in charge used isolation, sleep deprivation, and emotional manipulation to control their subjects. Even a “good edit,” like the one that producers had given his story line, didn’t protect you. Mostly, though, Thompson recognized that he’d been naïve about the job he’d signed up for—and that he hadn’t really understood it to be a job at all.
The reality genre has been around for seventy-five years, with roots that extend far past “Survivor” and “The Bachelor.” Shortly after the Second World War, radio networks began airing what were then called audience-participation programs, shows like “Candid Microphone” (the beta version of “Candid Camera”) and “Queen for a Day”—provocative, popular formats that put regular folks in the spotlight, then encouraged them to spill their secrets to the world. Élites dismissed these shows as crude gimmicks, but executives ate them up. They were low-budget and strike-proof—a way to tell stories without having to pay pesky writers or actors.
In today’s boom era for reality programming, with such shows less a novelty than a juggernaut, producers’ calculations haven’t shifted much. Most reality-TV crew members work brutal hours for low pay, with no benefits, on the margins of Hollywood. In recent years, there’s been some progress for editors and camera operators—a subset of whom have organized through the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees—but most producers and crew members remain essentially freelancers. For the people they film, the situation is starker: there has never been any sort of coördinated labor movement for reality cast members. In part, this is because, like Nick Thompson, most people don’t see going on a reality show as work. To unsympathetic eyes, and even to some sympathetic ones, it’s simply a different category of behavior: gonzo volunteerism, or an audition for fame, or a kind of extreme sport, in which people agree to put themselves at risk, emotionally or physically, for an adventure or the chance of future opportunities. If something bad happens to reality stars (as in porn, cast members are always “stars”), they literally signed up for it. The standard contract makes it nearly impossible for cast members to complain—or even to talk about how the show was made.
In labor terms, reality cast members float in a strange limbo. They’re not documentary subjects, who typically agree to be filmed for free but have some control over what hours they work and how much access they offer. They’re not professional actors, who memorize scripts, or talk-show hosts or newscasters, who can speak off the cuff. Instead, according to the sag-aftra union’s Network Code, which was first negotiated in the nineteen-fifties, when most television was aired live, they occupy a humbler niche: they’re “bona-fide amateurs,” who appear onscreen without any industry protections. The casts of “The Celebrity Apprentice” and “Celebrity Big Brother” are covered by sag-aftra; the casts of “The Apprentice” and “Big Brother” are not.
In the wake of #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movement, and of last year’s W.G.A. and sag-aftra strikes, there have been tremors of change, with talk in the press about a so-called reality reckoning, much of it focussed on Bravo, the network behind the “Real Housewives” franchise and its various thrashing tentacles of content. Bethenny Frankel, the flinty-eyed former Housewife who launched the Skinnygirl brand of low-calorie wines and spirits—and whose success inspired a reality-contract tweak known as “the Bethenny Clause,” allowing Bravo to take a cut of cast members’ products—stepped up as an unlikely Norma Rae. In July, 2023, she posted a video captioned “This is a union,” in which she advocated for a new model of reality-star employment with fair salaries and residual payments, and stumped for solidarity among women infamous for backbiting and betrayal. In a recent interview in the Hollywood Reporter, Bravo’s ringmaster, the producer and host Andy Cohen, waved that idea away: “You’re not drafted into the ‘Real Housewives,’ ” he said, arguing that “reality stars typically have other jobs” and parlay TV exposure into profitable ventures.
Since Frankel made her video, one lawsuit after another has been filed in the Bravoverse. But these have been pretty damp fireworks, sparking some headlines—about institutional racism or on-set neglect—but making little impact on public opinion. For onlookers, such revelations can be hard to distinguish from the drama the Bravo brand relies on, the bogus table-flipping and the genuine bankruptcies that are the network’s hallmark. It’s the Catch-22 of any reality soap opera: even legitimate workplace complaints look like spilled tea.
“Love Is Blind” has sold itself as a better breed of reality. Created by a former reality-TV agent named Chris Coelen, and co-hosted by the former boy-band heartthrob Nick Lachey—an O.G. reality star from MTV’s “Newlyweds”—and his wife, Vanessa, “Love Is Blind” was a smash hit for Netflix. It had the good fortune to début in February, 2020, with a format that eerily mirrored the loneliness of quarantine. The interracial lovebirds Lauren and Cameron struck many viewers as soothing counterprogramming to that year’s B.L.M. uprisings. And although the show was hardly the first to air live weddings—“Bride and Groom” did that shortly after the Second World War—there was an air of unfakeable spontaneity to its bottled courtships, a throb of authenticity that was generated, or at least intensified, by the artificial setting. Pure moments were framed by sillier ones, such as a hilarious sequence in which a tech-bro type tried to use eye drops to simulate tears, only to get outed by the editors, then villainized for the reality-show crime of not being on the show “for the right reasons.”
TV hits, like crushes, fade. Four years into its run, the show has become a staging ground for a nascent labor movement for reality stars. These efforts have taken multiple forms: first, various lawsuits against Netflix, Kinetic, and Delirium TV, the show’s other production company, making such accusations as false imprisonment and abuse; second, the creation of the Unscripted Cast Advocacy Network (ucan) by two dissident “Love Is Blind” alumni, Nick Thompson and his Season 2 castmate Jeremy Hartwell, along with a sympathetic psychologist; and, finally, an attempt to redefine appearing on a reality show as a full-time job that deserves the protections other workers receive, including the right to complain publicly about mistreatment. All this activity is happening under the shadow of severe nondisclosure agreements—contractual clauses that make it legally risky for reality stars to discuss any aspect of production. As tentative and untested as these gambits are, they’re the first genuine efforts to define cast members as more than fodder for the guilty-pleasure industrial complex.
The first case against “Love Is Blind” was a proposed class-action lawsuit filed in June, 2022, by Hartwell, who accused the production of “unsafe and inhumane” conditions, including sleep and food deprivation, in addition to multiple labor violations. A director at a Chicago mortgage company, Hartwell, like Thompson, wasn’t a reality-television viewer before becoming a contestant, and he, too, was recruited online, in his case on the dating site Hinge. Reared by Christian fundamentalist parents, he was also the first person in his family to get a bachelor’s degree, and he had a deep interest in “self-optimization.” But, whereas Thompson went all the way down the aisle, Hartwell stumbled a few days into the filming and left early—he barely shows up, making a goofy remark during the pod sequence about getting horny when he’s hung over.
When we first spoke, in February, Hartwell was vague about exactly what happened during filming: his N.D.A. is still in effect, and, as he made clear, there’s a legal difference between talking about abuse and disclosing “proprietary trade secrets.” But Hartwell said that in his short time on the show he felt “caught in the current” of the pods—the period when participants had marathon vulnerable conversations with strangers, falling in love or getting rejected, or sometimes both. Hartwell didn’t leave of his own volition, he said; at the same time, he felt trapped, knowing that there was a fifty-thousand-dollar fine for quitting without a producer’s consent—a provision that was present in contracts through at least Season 5. (Coelen has said that Kinetic never collected on it.) Hartwell described to me what sounds like a breakdown: before that week, he considered himself a “stoic, levelheaded, chill, happy” person; in the aftermath, he was traumatized, angry, and confused. There was a twelve-hour period in his hotel room that he couldn’t account for: “The best way I can describe it is vague, dark shadows of despair.” His psychologist told him that it sounded as though he’d entered “a fugue state.”
Hartwell, feeling confident that Kinetic would want to avoid this outcome for future cast members, contacted the company, only to be ignored until he said that he was getting a lawyer. Then Kinetic’s lawyer told him to “fuck off.” (Kinetic did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) It took some time for Hartwell’s lens to widen, for him to stop viewing what he had experienced as “an oversight,” some accidental problem that was limited to his season or his show. “It was all of reality TV,” he told me. “And thousands of people have gone through this—many of them far worse off than I was.” The genre itself was a shell game, “created as a revenue-mitigation strategy.” The psychological-manipulation techniques that producers used bore a strong resemblance to those used by cults, which also cut people off from the world. But nobody took such harms seriously, because nobody took reality TV—or the people who starred on it—seriously. The legal problem struck Hartwell as especially severe, particularly an arbitration clause embedded in contracts which mandated that any complaints against the show be settled privately. As a result, the public never knew when something went wrong on a set—allowing the audience to accept the show’s methods as normal.
Hartwell’s lawsuit noted that “Love Is Blind” cast members were paid far below minimum wage: a thousand dollars a week, for up to twenty hours of filming a day, seven days a week, amounting to $7.14 an hour. He also made an ambitious labor argument based on a new law in California, AB5, which required companies to classify many gig workers as W-2 employees. Hartwell believed that, since cast members were under the “substantial and excessive” control of their producers, they’d been misclassified as independent contractors. His suit demanded unpaid wages, compensation for missed meal breaks, damages for unfair business practices, and civil penalties for labor-code violations. (After the suit was filed, Kinetic responded that there was “absolutely no merit” to Hartwell’s accusations.)
In April, 2023, Hartwell, in collaboration with Thompson, incorporated ucAn as a nonprofit, putting up a Web site with the slogan “Cast members are people. NOT live props.” Reality alumni had been venting privately for decades, on text chains and e-mail threads, but ucAn aimed to build something more lasting and powerful: a mutual-support organization that doubled as a clearinghouse for legal and mental-health resources. Hartwell hoped to educate prospective contestants about the genre before they signed contracts. He also wanted to educate fans about how their favorite shows were made—to encourage them to be allies, not voyeurs.
Later that year, news emerged about another lawsuit, filed by Tran Dang, a cast member from Season 5, whose participants came from Houston. She alleged that, on the couples’ vacation in Mexico, her fiancé, Thomas Smith, had groped her, exposed himself, and assaulted her. When she shared what happened with producers, they chalked everything up to bad communication. In Houston, where Dang insisted on leaving the show, she was forced to film a final scene in which she was fed lines by hostile producers who insisted that she talk about the need for forgiveness. “I was made to repeat my lines over and over again until I faltered in desperation and gave them what they wanted,” Dang wrote. Many of the allegedly abusive events had been captured on tape, she claimed. Dang accused Smith, Kinetic, and Delirium of assault and battery; she also charged the production companies with negligence and false imprisonment—and argued that they were responsible for Smith’s misbehavior, because he was an employee. Smith, through his lawyer, denied the allegations. Dang’s lawyer, Benjamin Allen, told me in an e-mail that he was confident Dang would prevail, but that she couldn’t talk to me. Although Dang had the legal right to file her lawsuit, her right to speak to the press was less clear, “and as you know, these businesses like to sue their former participants.”
This was a clear reference to Renee Poche, another cast member from Season 5. Like Dang, Poche had filmed the show only to find that her relationship had not made the final edit. When she began to tell her story publicly, Kinetic sued her for four million dollars, a million for each of her public statements; it felt like a warning to every cast member. In response, ucan found Poche a pair of top Hollywood entertainment lawyers in just a day. It was “proof of concept” for the organization, Hartwell told me, noting, “If she had been sued just three months earlier, she would have been another silent victim.”
In the spring of 2022, Brianne Newman, a twenty-eight-year-old resident of Houston, got word of a production-assistant gig on Season 5 of “Love Is Blind.” It was an opportunity too good to pass up, particularly since her sister was “fully addicted” to the show. On set, Newman was assigned to a team that followed one of the couples, Renee Poche and her fiancé, Carter Wall. From the start, she adored Poche, a thirty-one-year-old veterinarian from a Cajun background who impressed her as warm, funny, and clever, “a whole-ass career woman” who owned a beautiful home and a Porsche. Wall, on the other hand, struck her as a broke alcoholic with anger issues. It baffled Newman that Kinetic had cast him—he certainly didn’t strike her as marriage material.
Based on accounts from eight crew members, at many levels of production, Newman’s opinions about the couple were widely shared. Poche was described to me, variously, as “wonderful, with a good head on her shoulders,” “a very sweet young lady,” “just an absolute perfect human being,” and “TV gold!” She handed out drawings to crew members as gifts (including a classy nude self-portrait that she had stuck to her fridge; after a P.A. complimented it, she gave it to him, infuriating Wall). She cooked for the crew. Poche was charismatic enough that many crew members—and several cast members—assumed that she’d be the season’s breakout star.
Few people liked Wall. He compulsively chewed tobacco; on set, rumors flew that he had used slurs, including “faggot.” One crew member described him as “a racist, bigoted hillbilly who didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything.” Many people theorized that he was seeking “a sugar mama,” and also trying to get famous. But they acknowledged that he wasn’t alone in his pursuit of fame, especially by Season 5: when a reality show became a hit, the cast’s motives were no longer so simple, if they ever had been. The point of “Love Is Blind” was still to get married, but the show also offered a path to a glamorous life, from Instagram endorsements to Hollywood jobs. It was possible—and, really, it was logical—for cast members to dream of more than one thing.
Poche, who grew up in a Louisiana trailer park, was a politically liberal animal lover who was seeking an equal partner, someone with whom she could raise a child. Wall came from a more middle-class background. At first, in the pods, their relationship looked sunny, likely because their talk didn’t go deep. During dates, they drank and flirted, building a playful but superficial rapport. Wall often just mirrored back whatever Poche said about herself, telling her, among other things, that it was a relief to meet a fellow-atheist. One thing that Wall, a Texan, was transparent about was that he was unemployed, something that had turned other women in the pods off. Poche was O.K. with it, as long as Wall agreed to get a job when they returned to Houston.
After the “reveal,” though, things began unravelling. In Mexico, Poche and Wall, now engaged, hooked up, but it was sometimes suffocatingly hot in their hotel room, which they couldn’t leave. When they were filming a shower scene, Wall threatened to slap the camera operator. According to an account that Poche later gave on a podcast, he blew up at another crew member for not letting him spit dip tobacco into her water bottle.
When they left the resort, the couples got their phones back. Wall’s was dead, dropped for nonpayment. After it was revived, on the flight home to Houston, Wall showed Poche his screen: he had negative two hundred dollars in his bank account. (He’d been expecting to live off the show’s thousand-dollar-a-week salary and had failed to sign up for automatic deposits from Kinetic.) In Texas, Poche discovered that not only was Wall unemployed, he had no fixed address—as a stopgap, he was crashing at a female friend’s house. In an apartment that Kinetic provided for Wall and Poche, he drank heavily, scarfed Adderall, and spent more time partying and fishing than working on his résumé. They went out for dinner and Poche suspected that he stiffed the waiter.
When Newman, the P.A., had watched “The Bachelor” in high school, she’d wondered if scenes were scripted. But the conflicts she witnessed between Poche and Wall felt unpleasantly authentic. “We would hide in the dark bedrooms while they would fight for, like, hours on end,” she told me. After a couples’ barbecue, the pair had a huge argument, with Wall calling Poche ugly names, including “thot”—for “that ho over there.” Later, at the apartment, Newman saw Poche “barrelling out, sobbing, with her bags packed.” She was moving back to her own house, although she kept showing up for shoots.
Why did Poche continue filming? Maybe she was still trying to salvage the relationship. Maybe she hoped to get a good edit, or, with so much footage in the hands of producers, maybe she feared a bad one. Maybe she simply wanted to complete the narrative—to walk down the aisle and say no to a bully, for the world to see. That was how reality production had always operated: the people in charge rarely had to threaten contestants with their contract, because the atmosphere on set did the work. On “The Bachelor,” producers called this phenomenon the Bubble: the show came to feel like your whole world, its values your own. Your producers seemed like friends or therapists, sharing private jokes, guiding you through choices, hinting at love or future fame; they knew everything about you, having been filled in on your psychological makeup and having read your journal each night.
Sometimes, though, producers gave explicit directives. In Houston, Wall bought Poche some pet fish, then neglected them until they died. For Poche, this was the last straw: she was calling the wedding off. As a crew member looked on, unnerved, a producer, John (J.P.) Paul, told Poche and Wall that they couldn’t stop filming now—they had to make it down the aisle, then end it. He fed Poche a line that, he said, she could deliver like a threat: “I’ll see you at the altar!”
As one “Love Is Blind” crew member described it, Poche had been “soft-forced” to complete the season, despite her doubts. There was a sunk-cost fallacy to the whole thing: if your story never got told, what was it all for?
Toward the end of the Houston shoot, the couple’s producer, Paul, chauffeured Wall and Poche home from a date. Wall, who was in the back seat, blew up when Poche criticized him for spitting chewing tobacco. The crew buzzed with rumors about the incident—including that Wall had punched the back of Poche’s car seat. Newman, who told me that she’d come to think of the cast as “her little babies,” felt “petrified” for Poche. That day, her team settled on a new approach: they would never leave the couple alone.
Other crew members also felt concerned for Poche’s safety, including Khadijah Forte, whose job included compiling “hot sheet” summaries of plot points from a live audio feed. She heard Wall warn Poche, “You better be nice to me,” more than once. “I don’t know what he meant by that, but it just seemed threatening,” she said. One day, the couple fought over Wall using slurs and stealing from another cast member. When Forte logged the fight, Paul asked her to remove it from her summary.
This account of Wall is backed by a cast member, Maris Prakonekham, who left early, having never made a match, but who was invited by producers to the couples’ barbecue. A few drinks in, she laid into Wall. “I cussed him out!” she told me. “I was appalled at the way he was talking about Renee—‘That bitch doesn’t deserve me. She’s a whore.’ It was crazy that he was comfortable talking that way.”
When I recently reached Wall on the phone, he was driving to his job, as a bouncer at a strip club. His version of events aligned in many respects with the stories I’d heard, although he denied yelling or being abusive. (He hadn’t been in a fight since third grade, he said.) He had done short-term jobs in construction, on a fishing boat, and as a behavioral aide at a “kid prison,” but was out of work when a “Love Is Blind” casting person reached out to him on Facebook. “I was a professional drinker at that point,” he told me. “I could hang with the big boys.” In the pods, he’d fallen for Poche, “my little barefoot Cajun girl,” only to have her pull away after she saw his bank balance. Wall told me that he felt “butt-hurt” by her judgment, seeing it as hypocritical, in part because of something that she’d told him in confidence, off camera, in Mexico: she’d once had an OnlyFans account, which she had since deleted.
As we spoke, Wall swung between praising Poche—and admitting that he’d blown the relationship because of his own immaturity—and making undermining remarks about her. (She was “a ‘free the nipple’-type gal,” “in the ninety-ninth percentile of both libido and income,” “a real freaky rich woman!”) He denied that he’d punched the car seat, done a dine-and-dash, stolen anything, said racist things, or acted in a threatening way. He did admit to calling Poche a “thot,” and to saying “Shut your ho-ass mouth” at the barbecue, while drunk. He had also used the word “faggot,” but said that it had been a joke. In addition, he acknowledged trying to sneak a woman into the Houston apartment he’d shared with Poche—something he’d justified as payback for her rejection—only to get caught by crew and cast members. When I asked Wall, who told me that he had recently found God, if he regretted having signed up for “Love Is Blind,” he initially said that he’d do it all again, except that he would get a job this time. Then he changed his mind: “No, I probably wouldn’t take it. The thought of people knowing things about me . . .” His voice trailed off. “I thought I wanted to have attention. I don’t want attention.”
If you watched Season 5 of “Love Is Blind,” you know that none of these events wound up on the show. Neither did the wedding ceremony that Poche stormed out of, ending her relationship with Wall for good. Instead, she shows up onscreen only in glimpses, a star turn trimmed into a cameo: she makes wisecracks in the pod lounge, and later on, in Houston, she perches on a sofa during another woman’s bridal-gown fitting, identified as a member of the “Pod Squad,” and mysteriously wearing white herself. Wall is barely present. The decision to cut the couple’s story was made around April, 2023—the month that the Business Insider exposé appeared. By that time, the initial edit had been completed, and in September many crew members tuned in, eager to see Poche, their favorite character, have her story told, only to realize that she’d disappeared.
According to interviews that she gave after the season began streaming, Poche herself learned about the decision in August. She didn’t buy the explanation she got, which was that the story line was cut for time—the fifth season was eleven episodes, whereas the others had had at least fourteen—and that Kinetic hoped to spare her from reliving a bad experience. During this period, Kinetic also informed her that she hadn’t been cast in a spinoff dating show, “Perfect Match,” a competition show starring former reality stars.
Wall had a different explanation for their story being removed, one that squared with what most people I spoke to had heard: a close friend of his had called Kinetic, warning that he might kill himself if the season aired. Wall denied to me that he had been suicidal—his friends had overreacted to his drinking, he said—but he admitted to being worried about coming off as a loser on the show.
Another factor may have informed Kinetic’s decision not to air the uncomfortable story of Poche and Wall’s relationship: the sexual-assault lawsuit by Tran Dang. Shortly after Season 5 débuted, Dang’s legal action—which had been filed fourteen months earlier—hit the press. Poche read an article in People in which Chris Coelen, the “Love Is Blind” creator, called Dang’s false-imprisonment charge “preposterous,” claiming that the set was a secure, supportive environment, and insisting that Dang had never expressed concerns about her safety. Poche, who was one of Dang’s friends from the pods, was livid—and began speaking out.
After Poche gave two interviews about the show, she received cease-and-desist orders, which she ignored; plenty of “Love Is Blind” cast members had done interviews without being sued. In a third interview, she talked in depth about her fear of Wall, beginning with that shower scene in Mexico. In Houston, she said, the production would cut scenes short when he got angry. “I think they were just as scared as I was,” she said. “Eventually, I was, like, ‘I don’t want to be with him alone. Like, I’ll go for filming, finish whatever we need to do . . . but I’m not staying at the apartment and I’m not even gonna be there during the day.’ ” The producers had agreed to this, she said, but nobody stepped in to protect her—instead, they kept urging her to give Wall the benefit of the doubt. When she told Wall that he frightened her, he guilt-tripped her, saying that he’d hit rock bottom: “He said it made him sad that I would think that. But he’s six-foot-five, three hundred pounds—like, a huge guy with a really bad temper!”
Whereas Dang’s lawyer was a Houston employment attorney, ucan set Poche up with Mark Geragos and Bryan Freedman, powerful Hollywood entertainment lawyers who had connections across the TV industry. Freedman had negotiated exit settlements for many celebrities, including the “Bachelor” host Chris Harrison and the “America’s Got Talent” host Gabrielle Union. Geragos appeared regularly on cable news. Years earlier, Freedman had represented United Talent Agency in a dispute with Chris Coelen, who’d recently left the company. (Freedman has a legal history of his own: when he attended the University of California, Berkeley, a teen-ager claimed that he’d sexually assaulted her; although he denied that anything nonconsensual had occurred, he was party to a settlement of forty thousand dollars.)
Geragos and Freedman had begun building an extensive legal case against the reality-TV industry, snapping up clients, among them Bethenny Frankel and other litigants tied to Bravo shows. Neither lawyer watched much reality programming, but the working conditions in the industry struck them as shocking, even for Hollywood. “There are people signing contracts that aren’t just illegal—they void the entire contract itself!,” Freedman told me. “There’s an ecosystem in which people bring therapists to the set and then those therapists break confidentiality and share information with executives and executive producers—and even lawyers for the studio. I mean, it’s unbelievable.”
In January, 2024, Poche filed a counterclaim saying she had signed up for a show that bragged about screening out men with “red flags,” only to find herself engaged to an unemployed serial liar who was “homeless, violent, estranged from his parents and actively addicted to alcohol and amphetamines.” (Wall denies that he is violent or estranged from his parents.) Now the company that she believed had put her in danger was suing her for telling the truth. Geragos and Freedman’s goal was to nullify Poche’s contract—which, they argued, contained multiple illegal clauses, all of them standard for reality shows—and to blow up that prohibitive N.D.A. If it was declared illegal, a piñata of revelations about the industry would split open. “If this doesn’t attract you as a lawyer, you should be selling oranges on the side of a freeway,” Geragos told me.
For decades, reality fame was the monkey’s paw of Hollywood. You were globally famous but flat broke—a household name, harassed by haters, with no prospect of an entertainment career. In the two-thousands, the Kardashians blazed a new path, and soon afterward Instagram opened up the path to anyone. By the time “Love Is Blind” began airing, many ordinary people had “followers,” and reality fame was more of an intensifier, like squirting accelerant on the flames of social media. Even low-level stars could cut branding deals; bigger stars could make a fortune as full-time influencers, like Lauren Speed-Hamilton and Cameron Hamilton, the Season 1 couple, who run a YouTube channel on which they posted a sponsored fifth-anniversary vow renewal at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. Stars could jump from one reality show to another, hoping for a do-over—and the more star power you accrued, the better you were treated. In the dream scenario, you might host a reality series and join sag-aftra.
In the eyes of Hartwell, these perks amounted to “golden handcuffs” as effective as any N.D.A. They kept former contestants tied to companies such as Kinetic, jockeying for favored status. Though only a few made it big, opportunities dangled in front of other cast members, if they played ball. “I won’t name names, but a lot of the cast, before the show aired, were angry, railing against how they were treated,” Hartwell told me. “But here’s the thing—that feeling is rational! If you go on one of these shows, you’re not paid anything. You go through all this trauma, then all of a sudden you’re presented with an opportunity to actually make money off of it. . . . Who knows what I would have done.”
There were cast members for whom the experience felt worth it. Among these was Alexa Lemieux, from Season 3, whose experience resembled Nick Thompson’s, but with a happy ending. She, too, signed up on a whim, mid-pandemic, having swooned at Lauren and Cameron’s formative “I love you.” She, too, fell in love fast, in her case with a sales manager named Brennon Lemieux. They became the season’s “stable” couple, and were another cross-cultural pairing: he was from a rural, lower-middle-class Christian family; she was from an Israeli American family in Dallas that had become wealthy. Alexa Lemieux told me that she hadn’t found the experience in the pods cultlike, just “emotionally intense.” To her, the set had felt almost luxurious, a secure retreat where her requests (an espresso Martini, some sushi) were catered to by crew members whom she trusted.
The contestants, she argued, were all adults who had chosen to take a gamble. Nobody had to drink. She had stayed friends with her Kinetic producer and was especially close to Colleen Reed, her fellow-bride that season; only cast members truly understood the experience, she said. Both women had Instagram accounts on which they showed themselves trying out beauty products—and, in Lemieux’s case, maternity jumpsuits. She and Brennon were expecting their first child. For Alexa, the one downside of “Love Is Blind” was the viewers, who had sent antisemitic death threats and mocked her plus-size body. (On Instagram, she sometimes posted droll clapbacks to critics.) None of that would have been worth it if she hadn’t met Brennon, she said. But she’d never have met him without the show.
There is yet another monetizing option for ex-cast members: chatting publicly about the show they were on. That was the path taken by Deepti Vempati and Natalie Lee, who’d appeared alongside Thompson and Hartwell on Season 2. After Vempati’s fiancé rejected her for her looks, she spun her humiliation into a phoenix-from-the-flames brand. In the fall of 2022, she published a memoir, “I Choose Myself.” The following March, she and Lee launched “Out of the Pods,” a podcast on which they interviewed former cast members, touting “exclusives” and “allegations” in between mental-health ads. According to Fortune, they’d each quit their day job and made half a million dollars in nineteen months. “Out of the Pods” was one twinkling star in a galaxy of reality gossip sites, TikToks, and podcasts, a bizarro-world form of investigative journalism that functioned as added content for fans of the reality genre—and as a way for participants to have their say.
When Poche decided to talk publicly about “Love Is Blind,” these platforms were waiting. In October, 2023, she did an upbeat interview on “Reality Life with Kate Casey,” staying positive while hinting that Wall had shown signs of volatility. On the Web site PopSugar, she described “an emotional roller coaster . . . which I will get into, but not right now.” On “Out of the Pods,” however, she opened up, flipping through her journal and tracing the path of her complicated feelings, from the playful flirtation with Wall in the pods to “farting around” in Mexico, where she ignored signs of trouble, to the uglier dynamic in Houston, as “all of the lies started to add up.” She told the hosts, “I fell in love with a pretend person.” She and Lee bonded, lamenting how hard it was to resist or even identify emotional abuse while stuck inside a TV show. One detail that Poche shared felt especially damning: producers had asked her to make sure that Wall couldn’t access a gun that she kept in her car for security. Poche also weighed in on Dang’s lawsuit: she described her former castmate as a kind, timid woman who, when she tried to quit, had been pressured to keep filming. “They don’t want me to tell my story,” Poche said of Kinetic, adding, “It’s my story—it’s for me to tell people.”
Throughout the fall of 2023, she posted on social media, using hashtags such as #releasethereneecut and posting a photograph of herself on set, trying on her wedding dress. Online, she snuffed out alternative narratives, like a rumor that she’d been married before appearing on “Love Is Blind.” (She got married afterward, to a different man, something she hadn’t mentioned during casting for “Perfect Match.”) At one point, Wall—whose friends had egged him on to respond—posted a video with the caption “Breaking the silence, unveiling the truth.” Wall, wearing a camo shirt, declared, “Time to fill y’all in on what happened between me and ol’ Miss Renee and address some of these frickin’ rumors that are outlandish.” With a nasty grin, he added, “And tell y’all a little something y’all don’t know about ol’ Miss Renee.” After a pause, he said, “Coming soon”—then he walked offscreen.
Poche stomped that scoop flat: she reposted Wall’s video, adding a clown emoji, then delivered the news herself, as casually as a text: “Going to say that I used to have an onlyfans since I told him off camera. Lol ok.” Around this time, Poche posted a photograph of herself and her friend Taylor Rue, a fellow cast member, wearing sexy tank tops and apprehensive expressions, under the words “Us wondering where our men were Jan 6.” Wall deleted his video and went back to posting fishing shots. Poche continued to roll out an array of likable content, from a slide show about her travels in Cuba to a video called “A Day in the Life of a Shelter Veterinarian.” She also promoted products such as lash serum and vegan deodorant.
“Love Is Blind” crew members followed these developments closely, some more sympathetically than others. One camera operator told me of the people she filmed, “They’re insane.”Another crew member, who felt enormous empathy for the psychological pressure that cast members were under, nonetheless found it frustrating when they expected to be treated like Hollywood stars: “It’s not malicious, it’s just the way things have been done! If you’ve only done unscripted work, you wouldn’t think anything about this.” A production manager found cast members’ complaints irritating for a different reason: they were “coddled” compared with the crew, he argued. Yes, the contestants filmed for extremely long hours under tense conditions—for six weeks. He’d worked those same hours—and, often, longer ones—all year long, patching together spotty gigs without any chance of Instagram riches.
Nobody was closer to the cast members than the producers. John Paul, who worked with Ruhl briefly, in the pod sequence, and with Wall and Poche throughout their season, was in Vietnam when I reached him, where he was working on a show about middle-aged women seeking a fresh start. A promising athlete in college, he’d pivoted to entertainment after breaking his leg, spending fourteen years climbing the ranks from P.A. to producer and director. He told me that he loved to mix it up, shifting from emotionally draining shows such as “Temptation Island” to talent formats such as “MasterChef.”
Dating shows were their own special challenge, he explained, requiring multiple producers to embody varied personae, from the “fun girl” to the “wise grownup.” On “Love Is Blind,” where he’d been hired as a specialist in working with “difficult cast members,” his role was being “a bro or a dad figure,” a sports-loving dude at ease with blue-collar types. Male cast members felt comfortable sharing with him their confusion about women; with female contestants, he said, “I feel like I know how to ask them questions, because I’ve been dumped so many times! But I know how to touch their emotions, and to open them up and to make them cry.” He described himself as a true believer in the show’s psychological complexity. “Love Is Blind” offered him a greater creative challenge than other reality shows he’d worked on: instead of telling people what to say, his job was about shrewdly engineering scenarios that would elicit authentic responses, like a “meet the parents” scene. “We couldn’t push them to go to the altar,” he told me. “But you could have a woman talk it out and listen to her and see what she’s feeling, and then see what the guy’s feeling, and then help promote them to talk about it on camera the next day.” It was hard, round-the-clock work, he said: “It’s kind of your life for a while.”
Paul couldn’t go into detail about what had happened between Poche and Wall, but he told me that their narrative had begun as a fairy tale about “a beautiful veterinarian who cared about the world” and “a simple guy who fished and worked with kids and had so much promise.” In Houston, the gig got harder. “I cried with them,” he said. “I lost, you know, years out of my life dealing with them. My beard doesn’t grow anymore because of that one! But I was very close to both of them. And, with all the lawsuits that happened, I see both sides. And it’s a tricky position to be in.”
The reality-TV producers I’ve met are sharp observers skilled at getting strangers to open up. (Their profession shares something with that of journalists.) But they work inside the Bubble, too, honing skills that look far sketchier to outsiders, including aggressive interview techniques that one “Love Is Blind” contestant joked to me were like “therapy—but bad therapy!” A producer’s job is to bond with cast members while savvily exploiting conflicts among them, turning raw emotion into story beats. Some cajoled, some bullied. Compartmentalization was key. Michael Carroll, who spent years as a producer on “The Bachelor” and now works in hospitality, told me that, in his reality-TV heyday, “every other season I’d have a moral come-to-Jesus moment.” Then he’d get pulled back in—to make money, but also because the job was a thrill. Having left the industry, he now saw it in a different light. All of reality TV needed to be unionized, he said, but organizing casts would be the trickiest, because of how the industry viewed the people it filmed: “To us, as producers, for the longest time they were just a piece of a machine—they were commodities, to be honest.”
In mid-March, Netflix streamed the cast-reunion episode of Season 6 of “Love Is Blind,” filmed at a studio in L.A. It had been an odd, uneven season, with only one couple who’d got married. Maybe to compensate for that low hit rate, Kinetic had assembled a supergroup of couples from past seasons, who functioned as a Greek chorus, among them Alexa and Brennon Lemieux. (The Hamiltons had been invited, but they’d passed. Cameron’s Instagram bio read “Yes, I’m still a scientist,” but he was flacking a Hamilton-branded romantic retreat in Italy. The cost: $4,590 per person.)
To informed observers, the reunion, hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey, felt like a coded response to all the public accusations. The Lacheys began by touting the show’s impressive success rate—nine of eleven married couples were still together—and they kept underscoring one point: “Love Is Blind” was not a reality show but something more profound, an exploration of human closeness aimed at, and designed to be watched by, the pure of heart. It was a privilege to be chosen by Kinetic—one that you betrayed at your peril. This theme climaxed with the ambush of Trevor Sova, a Prince Charming-ish hunk who, in Season 6, had come across as a nice guy on the losing end of a love triangle. Now Nick confronted Sova with evidence to the contrary: spicy texts that he’d sent an ex, before and after filming. The texts had been leaked to gossip outlets, which posted them shortly before the reunion was taped.
As Lachey read the texts, Sova froze like a pinned butterfly. He stammered, mumbling incoherent apologies, confessing to his “toxic” behavior, saying that he’d gone on the show for both “good and bad reasons” and that he needed “real therapy.” The Lacheys looked on, stonily. Then Nick delivered his verdict. Being on “Love Is Blind” was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said. He decried the kind of cast member who wanted fame or fortune, or who concealed something from the producers, or even who dared to call the show “entertainment,” as one foolish Season 6 participant had done moments earlier. “For people who come here with ulterior motives, we’ve got to call you out for it,” Nick said. “So, Trevor, I know you asked to leave—you can leave now, man.”
Sova slumped away, having told his romantic partner from the pods that he’d been genuine with her, and that he’d apologize—but alone, off-camera. In April, he explained in an Instagram post that he’d had a panic attack on the air and that he was now seeing an “actual therapist.” Soon afterward, his Instagram account was gone.
The brutal showdown suggested an I’m-rubber-you’re-glue philosophy on the part of management. In Kinetic’s eyes, the true exploiters on “Love Is Blind” were bad cast members, not puppet-master producers. Not only was “Love Is Blind” not harmful to the mental health of its subjects, it was itself a kind of mental-health treatment—if you trusted the process. Ideally, it served the same function for viewers: “Watching the show is like therapy,” Brennon Lemieux said, describing how the couple used the show to help work through their own issues. When the Lacheys prompted cast members to name what they missed the most about filming “Love Is Blind,” they glowingly said the crew and the food.
Watching these events, I kept thinking about those goblets with their thick gold coating, campy enough for a pirate movie. The cups popped up not only in the pods but at cast barbecues and during family visits, subbed in by a crew member for the household’s regular glassware. Like everything else on set, the goblets served a purpose: because you couldn’t tell how much booze was in them, an editor could cut a scene in any order—if the level went up or down, you couldn’t tell. That is the nature of all reality shows, however delightful they may be to watch: the power lies with those who design the experiment, who have thousands of hours of footage of cast members, often drunk or confessing to highly personal stories, which the company owns and is allowed to air or not air, at any time it likes, and in any order. The cast members have some choices of their own: they can play up to the producers, resist them, or try to work around them. Like gamblers in Vegas, everyone has a system. But the house always wins.
When I spoke to Hartwell a few weeks after the special aired, he sounded calm but also frustrated. It was the first anniversary of ucan, and he had struggled to secure funding—philanthropies had other priorities. After a year of working for free, he was looking for a paying job. Inspired as he had been by labor breakthroughs at places such as Starbucks, he knew that the movement was in its infancy. Although he expressed deep appreciation for Bethenny Frankel’s video gesture, he also joked that it was like “The Office” ’s Michael Scott announcing, “I declare bankruptcy”: “You can’t just stand up and declare a union.” Hartwell still had big plans. He hoped to get a high-profile actor on board, for instance. And in a spirited Instagram post, he’d urged Kinetic to collaborate with his organization, an idea that struck me as the longest of long shots. But in May he had a breakthrough: it was reported that his class-action suit had been settled, for $1.4 million.
Earlier this month, sag-aftra, which had previously not commented on the emergence of ucan, sent me a statement supporting the organization and its goals. It asserted that “reality performers deserve Union protection like other Hollywood workers in the industry.” It was a meaningful turn given the history of the reality genre, which has often set unscripted performers against scripted ones.
Unions are only one way to achieve workplace justice, of course. ucan’s mental-health director, Isabelle Morley, described a different model: an outside watchdog on reality shows, something like an intimacy coördinator or the guardians who keep track of the treatment of animals and children on sets. These concepts all spoke to the ultimate question: Is it possible to build a better reality-television workplace, for both cast and crew members? Or does the genre rely on total control? The last time that I’d looked at Kinetic’s Web page, which listed such shows as “The Ultimatum: Queer Love” and “Man vs. Bear,” I’d noticed an unusual element: a page labelled “To All Potential Participants.” It urged applicants to “contemplate the possible discomfort and emotional challenges they may face before, during, and after filming,” and there were detailed sections about diligence during casting, and about what might happen onscreen. According to the Wayback Machine, this page was first captured on August 2, 2023, around the time that Poche was told she’d been mostly edited out of “Love Is Blind.”
For now, Hartwell primarily wanted to get cast members talking to one another, to recognize that they had rights. A lot of the trauma of going on a reality show comes from recognizing that you were susceptible to manipulation in the first place, something that only people who’ve been through it can understand.
In March, Renee Poche’s case hit a snag: L.A. Superior Court Judge Bruce G. Iwasaki rejected the suit, and denounced Geragos and Freedman for their “heated rhetoric.” Poche’s lawyers were preparing a petition for writ of mandate, which was similar to an appeal, but, if that does not succeed, her case will head into private arbitration, with the judge having ruled that there was “absolutely no evidence” that handling the matter secretly could cause Poche harm. “The court is stuck with the contract. That’s the contract,” he said, bluntly. The N.D.A. was holding, for now.
But there was promising news from a different courtroom, far from Los Angeles: Tran Dang’s case, which was playing out in Texas, had had a victory. The Court of Appeals for the First District of Texas had backed an earlier ruling saying that Dang’s claims fell under the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021. When her case went to trial, it would be public, accessible to the press. It would be a show worth watching. ♦
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2024-05-20 10:00:00Z
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