Millennials Are Rushing To Appear On A ‘Love Is Blind’ Knockoff While In Coronavirus Isolation

New York City may be in near lockdown, but that did not stop Steve, 28, a marketing executive living on the Upper East Side, and Katie, 27, who works in tech and lives in Hudson Yards, from going on a first date last night. They chatted amiably for nearly an hour, covering mostly the typical get-to-know-you stuff: where they’re from, where they lay their heads in New York, what they like to do (he is a gamer, she a little more of a gym rat). They both liked each other. “She was really down to Earth. Smart,” Steve says. “Really funny.” That’s a quality Katie noticed in Steve, too. “I appreciated his sense of humor.”

They both want to do another date, though they’re not exactly sure how that’ll work. Steve and Katie are one of 12 couples who volunteered for the “debut season” of Love is Quarantine, a blind-dating reality TV show of sorts (and a spoof of Netflix’s own viral hit, Love is Blind) that has turned into something of an overnight web hit. It was created yesterday—yes, yesterday—by two Brooklynite twentysomethings, Thi Lam, 27, and Rance Nix, 28. All of the videos and content for the show get posted to its Instagram page, which they launched Tuesday at 5 p.m. Then they pushed out a call for contestants through their social networks. Steve and Katie heard about it when a friend, who had, in turn, heard about it from another friend, texted them a link to Love is Quarantine and suggested they apply.

By 8 p.m., they had passed a brief screening conversation with Nix and were on the phone with each other. (An audio call only, no FaceTime. This, after all, suppose to be a blind date.) As promised, they reported back to Lam and Nix on the date—a hit—as did the other 11 couples. Lam and Nix fed the Instagram account with short video clips explaining how the dates were going and posting screen shots of text message conversations with the contestants. By this afternoon, Love is Quarantine had almost 3,000 Instagram followers and nearly 200 people from America, Canada, Korea and Britain—nearly all of them in their 20s—had signed up on a public Google doc for a turn on the show.

Thi, a freelance ad consultant, and Rance, a real estate broker and an aspiring actor, live together in Bushwick. They are not a romantic couple. Possibly like the contestants on their show, they’re “single and looking for the loves of our lives,” Rance says. They are avowed fans of the Netflix series from which theirs is lovingly based on and have thought long and hard about its cast members.

“Amber is irresponsible,” Rance says. “Her credit cards are maxed out. Like, please.”

“Ginnie Panini!” Thi shouts, referencing 25-year-old Giannina from the show, which is currently Netflix’s third most popular offering in America. “I can’t stand her. She is irrational. And she is a horrible communicator.”

“Barnett was the heartthrob, the hunk, the jock” and “after watching the full season, you actually come to find out that he’s a pretty great, well rounded guy,” adds Thi.

“It was kind of a surprise”—spoiler alert—“that  Kenny and Kelly did not get married,” Rance says. “But to Kenny’s credit. He was really, really gracious about it.” Love is Blind’s premise hit home on a personal level for Rance. “I happen to have the most common form of dwarfism. And what I thought was cool about the show is how they get rid of the physical aspect of dating,” he says. “You know, we come in all different shapes and sizes, and we all are different”

A premise worth swiping. Or, at least, riff on. The concept for their Love is Quarantine came together in about 24 hours (“We were going a little stir crazy,” says Rance), and they decamped yesterday afternoon for Thi’s studios in the Brooklyn Naval Yard—more space than their apartment—to shoot the videos and put up Love is Quarantine’s Instagram page.

They did it on a lark, driven by coronavirus-induced boredom, but what they created is a pretty good leading indicator of the type of human creativity that we’ll only exponentially more of during the coming weeks (perhaps months). Thi and Rance will be the first (and second) to admit they didn’t expect it to take off as it did. “I’m like, on the computer just going nuts,” Thi recalls of their efforts last night to get the couples set up into phone calls—or “pods,” a term lifted from Love is Blind. “It’s like, Okay, we have Chloe in Pod One,” he says, describing how he’d yell out instructions to Rance. “We have Joe in Part Seven—he needs a match. He’s 21. We need someone around that age! And we’re just going crazy.”

They’re making the rules and the show up as they go. Tonight they plan to do another “season”—matching up more contestants and assigning them to pods. (Erhm, phone calls.) It’ll all be chronicled in videos and text posts on Instagram. They’re also trying to figure out how to get the couples who found successful matches from the first night back onto the show. Their monetization goals are just as loose. Merch would make the most sense, but maybe there’s a way to offer paying subscribers some extra content. They say any money they take in will go to Feeding America, a non-profit group. That said, they’re not operating through unadulterated altruism. “Maybe we’ll get a meeting with Netflix,” Rance says.

Speaking of Netflix, isn’t Love is Quarantine a tadpole-size infringement on the entertainment giant’s IP? The general concept—blind dates—isn’t something Netflix would sue over, says Alex Alben, a legal scholar and a UCLA law professor. “There have been multiple game shows over the history of television. Format is not protectable,” he says. But the name could be potentially problematic. “Will people think that Love is Quarantine comes from the creator of Love is Blind? That would be the test that Netflix would have to establish to have a legal claim that there’s been confusion.”

For now, the Love is Quarantine guys have other things on their minds. Such as, a reunion episode. “We are,” says Thi, “thinking about—after quarantine is over— sending our, like, all-star contestants to Popeye’s for their honeymoon.”