It’s a bit “Married at First Sight”, a bit “First Date”, a bit “Men and Women”, a bit “Temptation Island”. The new Netflix reality show “Love is Heaven Italy” is the perfect series for those who love social experiments on love. But there is also much more behind its apparent superficiality.

It starts on December 1st with the first 4 episodes. A group of contestants, divided between men and women, spend their time in a loft as they wait to enter, one at a time, inside small rooms for their first dates. Be careful, though, because these will be completely in the dark. And the beauty lies precisely in this.

Single men and women, in fact, will have to get to know each other without ever looking at each other and choose each other only on the basis of the sensations felt while chatting divided by a wall that separates appearance from substance.

Yes, because the objective of this program is to demonstrate that you can fall in love even without taking into account the aesthetic aspect. But is it really like that?

Why this format works so well

Those who know this format – it has been running on Netflix for many years even if it is the first time in Italy – know very well that this reality show can offer quite a few surprises (and emotions). He knows how to entertain the public with a good dose of that trash that we like so much but also offers very interesting reflections on love. And the Italian version of this program does not disappoint expectations at all from this point of view.

The hosts Fabio Caressa and Benedetta Parodi appear only in the first minutes of the show and then completely leave space for the competitors and this choice of never interrupting the narrative with the hosts’ intrusions must be said to be absolutely winning. After all, what matters in a reality show is who makes it, not who hosts it.

The contestants are chosen with criteria and each of them represents one of the main stereotypes or, in any case, types of men and women that we find in real life. There is the manipulative and the sensitive, the rational one and those who, however, let themselves be carried away by emotions. There is the insecure woman who doesn’t want to always make the same mistakes and the gnawing one because she isn’t chosen first. There is a desire to fall in love – sometimes too much – and the fear of letting go to get yet another painful pole. A mix of human types which, when compared, make the social experiment truly interesting.

Furthermore, the choice to focus only on competitors all belonging to the same age group: 30 years old, is very appropriate. This element selects a very specific target which is, after all, the most correct for this type of program.

Another aspect of this reality show that works very well – and this is common to all editions of the show – is that it shows not only the blind choice made by singles but also what happens afterwards, when real life comes to break the idyll. What happens after you choose each other and the marriage proposal arrives? Coexistence begins, getting to know families, real confrontation, the “ugly” aspect of love. And this is where the strength of a relationship is measured.

Putting all these elements together we can confirm that “Love is Blind Italy” has the right amount of lightness and superficiality but also a hidden depth that, whoever wants it, grasps it, whoever doesn’t want it, still enjoys the show.

Furthermore, more than making us reflect on appearance, this reality show means that by looking at others and their right or wrong choices, we become a little more aware of our patterns in love, our common mistakes, our illusions and our fixations on what we think we want.

Often, it is only by shifting attention to someone else that we are able to understand ourselves better and if an apparently very light and even trashy reality show manages to make us improve even just a little in our approach to others, it has done more than its duty.

Rating: 7.3

Love is blind Italy: when all the episodes are released