Netflix reality just made streaming a lot less lonely

Cable cutting can be lonely. 

Sure, you can have binge-viewing parties or lively group texts. But for the most part, streamers consume their content alone. As a result, many TV conversations now focus more on making recommendations than mutual appreciation — effectively replacing vigorous audience debate with spoiler-free sales pitches.

What’s worse, even when everyone wants to be watching the same thing at the same time, the never-ending churn of premieres can make syncing your viewing tricky. Miss the few-day window after a big content drop and the world will move on faster than you can say “Stranger Things 3.” 

But then, through the listings and queues, Love Is Blind and The Circle came to change it all.

Why did these shows work? And can we expect to feel the same way when they return?

From and to and , Netflix’s back-to-back “three-week events” reinvigorated streaming discussion across the U.S. Throughout January and February, these shows united reality TV fans in a torrent of chaos and melodrama that achieved the closest thing to a reality smash hit since The Masked Singer hit Fox. 

The sudden success prompted critics to ask if Netflix had finally “” reality TV, as fans and press flocked to reevaluate the service’s unscripted catalogue. It was pure bliss. Trashy, trashy, garbage-y bliss, perfect for all of us here in Reality TV Dumpster Land. 

But with The Circle wrapped weeks ago and the Love Is Blind reunion out this Thursday, we’ve got to wonder whether Netflix’s burgeoning reality community will ever be this close again. Why did these shows work? And can we expect to feel the same way when they return?

We like reality TV for a lot of reasons: the showmanship, the schadenfreude, the allure of semi-engaging background noise. Still, much of reality TV’s success is predicated on audience interaction. We don’t return to Big Brother for the stunning cinematography any more than we watch Keeping Up With the Kardashians for the relatable character development. 

What we want is to talk about the , , and , to curse the Jeds, Abby Lees, and Anfisas while we praise the Hannahs, Tims, and Mary Berrys. These dramas are fun spectacles that play on the most fundamental of our entertainment instincts, letting us watch the things we can’t believe really happened. Trite but true, audiences love a train wreck — and the promise of even more unhinged content, free from the constraints of broadcast and cable television, made The Circle and Love Is Blind particularly exciting. 

Much of reality TV’s success is predicated on audience interaction. 

What’s more, reality TV scenarios allow viewers to explore the outer reaches of their judgment from the comfort of the couch. Seeing “real people” on TV gives us an opportunity to talk about ourselves and the way we see the world in an adventurous but safe way. 

We imagine our Bachelor entrances, our How Far Is Tattoo Far? revenge, and our Survivor strategies. We say what we’d do knowing we’ll never have to actually do it. Who among us didn’t imagine our Love Is Blind wedding? Our Circle profile? The cross-over event where we compete on The Circle with our Love Is Blind partner after getting Queer Eye-ed as a couple to destroy the competition?

In the past, this experience has thrived on cable, with nearly every reality behemoth having a home network and weekly airtime. With sports games, awards shows, and 24-hour news cycles, cable has a knack for turning TV into an event, and reality shows have seriously benefitted from that. But streaming services’ attempts to mirror this formula have seen mixed results.

Of course, there are plenty of online-only reality shows with strong followings. Netflix’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, Blown Away, Dating Around, and many others have inspired passionate conversations at their times of release. 

But perhaps because seasons of these shows are delivered all at once, our short attention spans have tended to allow the resulting discourse to dwindle quickly. Sure, Tidying Up was inescapable for a week or two, but it’s nothing compared to the weekly dialogue of Bachelor Nation, the months of Masked Singer identity speculation, and our endless fascination with cast members of KUWTK, Vanderpump Rules, and the Housewives empire.

Bigger successes like Queer Eye and Nailed It! have circumvented the issue by producing as many episodes as quickly as production would allow. To date, Queer Eye has produced four full seasons and Nailed It! has produced three full seasons, two holiday editions, and one international spin-off (with ). Both did so under two years, extending their stay in the cultural conversation substantially.

But with just 22 episodes between them, Love Is Blind and The Circle take a different approach. 

The series’ three-week event format, established by Netflix’s hip hop competition show Rhythm + Flow last October, hits a sweet spot between massive content drops and a single episode release. It mimics the pageantry of cable well and makes these shows all the more tempting. 

Depending on the week, The Circle and Love Is Blind viewers receive anywhere between two to five hours of juicy, high-stakes reality content in multi-episode bundles. You can savor each chapter or devour them all in one night — whatever’s most convenient for you.

“The Netflix service offers a lot of flexibility for us to try new things, and we saw the three-week release as a way to spread the word about these new shows in a simple but different manner,” Brandon Riegg, Netflix’s Vice President of Nonfiction Series and Comedy Specials, tells Mashable of the shows’ word-of-mouth approach in an e-mail.

“Netflix members love having access to all episodes at once, so this really was a middle ground that didn’t totally take away that control over how much to watch.”

With their mini-binges completed and the promise of the next installment on the horizon, viewers can then flock to fellow fans for streamer-to-streamer bonding. Over the last two months, Love Is Blind and The Circle have inspired debates about , , , and that spread across social media and IRL convos like wildfire. 

“We saw the three-week release as a way to spread the word about these new shows in a simple but different manner.”

Rather than broadly reflecting on 10 or 12 hours of content in vague platitudes, viewers drilled down on the specifics that intrigued them so they could speculate about upcoming episodes. The opening for discussion was wide, and as a result, I personally had a better time with Love Is Blind than many of the other reality shows I’ve streamed. 

It connected me with people I rarely speak to (acquaintances, high school classmates, a particularly chatty flight attendant), all eager to break down the show’s wild details. There was a ton to grab onto, and grab we did. 

Conversely, when I critiqued the first four episodes of The Circle for Mashable in early January, I gave it a . Required to watch in a pre-release, your-eyes-only vacuum, I struggled to find the fun on my own. I still stand by what I said — yes, The Circle can be “screamingly boring” — but I have to admit I enjoyed it more once funneled into Netflix’s three-week event format. 

When a coworker caught up on The Circle after its premiere, we Slacked about the series’ various strong points (specifically how fun the IRL meetings/eliminations are) and she unknowingly convinced me to give it another try. I watched the remaining eight episodes of The Circle with the rest of the world and had a surprisingly good time. Weeks later, I’m still eager to hear my colleague’s thoughts on the finale.

But it wasn’t just the release schedule that made The Circle and Love Is Blind sing. Thematically, the two series cater perfectly to the very online nature of modern discourse.

In the dating game Love Is Blind, participants are forced to make romantic decisions based only on what their suitor tells them. In the social media competition show The Circle, contestants measure their success by internet popularity. Both series play with identity curation and gamified social status spectacularly. It makes sense that viewers extended that framing into their fandoms.

“As much as [Netflix] members loved watching the shows, they also really loved discussing and debating so many moments and elements with others on social media,” Riegg agrees, emphasizing his belief that the modernity and inventiveness of the shows are ultimately what made them work.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all plan. A really captivating and enjoyable show will be found and talked about, whether it’s released over a few weeks or all at once.”

Then, you’ve got the fact that, when compared to many cable reality programs, both series had remarkably inclusive casts. Throughout The Circle, rotating characters of different races, ages, cultural backgrounds, and sexual identities and orientations stole the spotlight in equal measure. The varying perspectives welcomed reality-loving communities of all kinds, while expanding conversation to keep the show substantively diverse.

Meanwhile, Love Is Blind fit into the typical heteronormative box by pairing men with women and women with men. But it didn’t shy away from considering the socioeconomic and racial barriers that run rampant in the dating world — even when that required hosts Vanessa and Nick Lachey to awkwardly ask, “Is love really blind?” over and over and over again.  

“Everyone deserves to see themselves reflected on screen,” Riegg notes. “And the beauty of the unscripted genre is there’s room for people from all walks of life.”

In between those two shows was Cheer, a docuseries akin to Netflix’s already successful Last Chance U. Cheer followed the traditional binge model, but still helped boost Netflix’s reputation for reality programming and kept the service’s momentum at a tight clip. What’s more, it provided content to sprinkle in between our Circle and Love Is Blind binges — as did true crime series Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and the return of Jon Favreau’s The Chef Show.

So, we know why this worked. But can Netflix do it again? And does it want to?

At present, neither The Circle nor Love Is Blind have been renewed. But fans are already vying for a chance to get cast — and based on Netflix’s self-reported numbers, there’s no obvious reason for the streaming service to not make more episodes. Still, when asked about the future of reality TV at Netflix, Riegg was reluctant to make promises.

“The three-week events are an experiment for us, and the decision [to do them again] will depend on what’s best for each show,” Riegg tells Mashable. “We’ve only been making original unscripted shows for about three years, so we have a lot to look forward to!”

Their lives and our queues will never be the same. 

Like anything in popular culture, though, our TV tastes change fast. By the time there’s fresh blood in The Circle house and Love Is Blind’s “pods,” streamers could find their interests wandering elsewhere. 

In the first Golden Age of TV of the 1940s and 1950s, viewers were united by just a few channels of programming and strict air times. In the Golden Age of the 2000s and 2010s, we indulged in high production qualities and limitless choices. But now, with the streaming wars coming to a rolling boil, too much of a good thing could lose us some of what we like best. 

Netflix will have no choice but to continue adapting its strategies across genres to beat back competitors. Change this reality formula for the better and the service will get more subscribers. Change it for the worse and it’ll lose fans. Don’t change it at all and it’s a crapshoot: We’ll either like this same stuff same time next year or we won’t. But hey, that’s reality.

For now, The Circle and Love Is Blind viewers can revel in knowing we were part of a special moment in reality history. We united across couches, mobile devices, and social platforms to watch a whole bunch of people make some really bad choices. And going forward, we can have faith that their lives — and our queues — will never be the same. 

The Circle and Love Is Blind are now streaming on Netflix.