I’m still mad you canceled it so quickly! You had to rub my face in the demise of Dating Around. But it’s a potent category and I think it just took finding the producers with the innovating vision to get viewers to respond and come in droves. We only had two seasons it wasn’t as broadly commercial as we needed it to be. Every one of them has been a home run. Even going back to Dating Around, which was our first real foray into the dating category and a really well-received, beloved show. Chris Coelen has an amazing knack for that genre of unscripted and we’re fortunate that he’s partnered with us so many times. The partners we’ve worked with have been terrific. We made a choice to get into that category years ago and it’s paid off really well. I wish there was sort of more recognition or even acknowledgement of how strong those formats and franchises are. I would argue that, to your point, Too Hot to Handle, Love Is Blind, Ultimatum, Perfect Match - those are the biggest dating shows in the world right now, particularly Love Is Blind. version - it’s all the versions you see globally. Love Is Blind is the most impactful unscripted format we have, and not just the U.S. Would you say these shows are collectively to you what The Voice is to NBC or Survivor to CBS - the central engine of your division?ĭating shows have been a true powerhouse genre for us. Too Hot to Handle has also been a major hit. Love Is Blind is huge, and you’ve expanded on its success with two other shows from producer Chris Coelen, Perfect Match and The Ultimatum. Let’s start by talking about the Netflix dating-show universe you’ve built. Vulture recently caught up with Riegg for a wide-ranging, hourlong conversation about the year in Netflix unscripted. He oversees a unit that cranks out dozens of titles every year across just about every imaginable genre of reality TV, coordinating that massive output with the efforts of his colleagues at Netflix’s other unscripted production factories in countries such as South Korea, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. Overseeing the increasingly crowded galaxy of Netflix unscripted shows is Brandon Riegg, a 20-year veteran of the reality business who worked at ABC and NBC before making the move to Netflix in 2016 to help build the division. That show has already been renewed for a second season. And to cap things off last month, the streamer returned to live events with the golf-themed Netflix Cup and debuted Squid Game: The Challenge, its mildly controversial competition series modeled after its scripted smash. It continued to build on the success of its long-running Formula 1: Drive to Survive with more docuseries set in the world of sports, including Full Swing (golf), Break Point (tennis), and Quarterback (American football). Meanwhile, the Netflix reality-TV assembly line churned on, with new seasons of the tentpoles in its ever-expanding dating show universe ( Too Hot to Handle, The Ultimatum, and newcomer Perfect Match) and its growing library of real estate–related titles ( Selling Sunset, Selling the OC). Viewers dissected every messy TikTok angle on Micah Lussier and Paul Peden’s aborted wedding and every detail involving the surprise preshow connection between Uche Okoroha and Lydia Velez Gonzalez. While the “live reunion that wasn’t” resulted in a few hours of snarky tweets and headlines, for the rest of the year, the onscreen drama kept Love Is Blind a regular part of the pop culture conversation and a frequent presence on Nielsen’s streaming ratings charts. And it was further proof that, just five years after Queer Eye and Nailed It became its first big unscripted hits, Netflix is now one of the dominant players in reality TV. It was a sign of just how massive the show’s global audience had become - bigger than that of a Chris Rock comedy special - and how much passion those viewers had for it. Netflix execs would later reveal that the reason most viewers couldn’t watch the reunion live was because of a software bug that only surfaced when too many subscribers tried to stream Love Is Blind at once. Yet the fiasco was also something of a triumph for the streamer’s unscripted division. Between Netflix’s legendary engineering prowess and the fact that a live Chris Rock special had gone off without a hitch just a month earlier, it was a stunning turn of events the company had not anticipated. On April 16, the streamer’s much-hyped plan to air a live reunion special for its hit show Love Is Blind went spectacularly awry when technical demons prevented the vast majority of subscribers from actually watching the event. It’s oddly appropriate that one of the biggest Netflix reality-show moments of 2023 revolved around an unplanned twist. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photo: Netflix
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