Netflix’s Romance Reality Slate Went Year-Round in 2022, but Where Are the Hits?

The world could always use a little more love — and love is exactly what Netflix wanted to give viewers when it announced its year-round reality romance slate earlier this year. Okay — maybe “love” isn’t the most accurate word, but can you think of a more succinct way to say “hotties making major romantic decisions in front of cameras, sometimes for money and sometimes while wearing a bikini”? I didn’t think so. Love it is!

Hot off of the success of Love Is Blind Season 2, a.k.a. The Shaina Season, Netflix announced that they were committing to a year of reality romance shows, starting with the premiere of The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, and continuing throughout the year with new seasons of existing series Too Hot to Handle, Indian Matchmaking, and Love Is Blind, as well as the premieres of a US iteration of Australian series Love On the Spectrum, and the premiere of a new series titled Dated and Related. This lineup provided some variety, with Love on the Spectrum and Indian Matchmaking providing a less sensational, more documentary-style look at love — and The Ultimatum, Too Hot to Handle, Dated and Related, and Love Is Blind giving full reality TV Bacchanalia.

Now that 2022 is coming to a close, though, we have to wonder — did this year-round reality romance situation pay off for Netflix? Did they successfully launch any new reality romance shows? And is the audience’s relationship with the OGs still sizzling or fizzling out? Let’s look at the numbers!

First, let’s look at the Google Trends stats for five of the shows in question. This measures how much search engine interest there was around each series, which is about as close to objective ratings as we can get.

As you can see, Love Is Blind is far and away the only big hit of the bunch — and even then, Season 2 generated more search interest than Season 3. The only other shows that made a noticeable spike are Too Hot to Handle and The Ultimatum.

Removing Love Is Blind from the chart allows us to look at the rest of the shows in more detail, and it also frees up a space to see how Dated and Related fared.

Turns out, not that well! Both Love on the Spectrum and Indian Matchmaking generated more search interest than Dated and Related, and all three of those shows garnered a fraction of the traffic that Too Hot to Handle and The Ultimatum scored.

The Ultimatum was a decent hit for Netflix, something that’s further proven by the year’s backlog of Nielsen ratings for streaming programs. It managed to land in the Nielsen top ten for three weeks in April, accomplishing something that Love Is Blind didn’t even do: it was the #1 program on streaming for one week in April.

Love Is Blind still did well, landing on the Nielsen charts 11 times in 2022. The only other reality romance show to pull that off was Too Hot to Handle Season 3, which managed to land at #18 when it dropped the entire season all at once in January of 2022.

These stats all focus on the short-term, though. How healthy are these relationships in the long run? Let’s look at the three series — Love Is Blind, Too Hot to Handle, and Indian Matchmaking — that existed prior to 2022.

Love Is Blind is, unsurprisingly, the most consistent performer. Season 2 even edged out Season 1 in Google Trends. Season 3’s traffic fell by a quarter, but still performed well in the Nielsen ratings. Too Hot to Handle, though, seems to be losing heat. It was never as big a hit as Love Is Blind, but their debut seasons were close enough. Subsequent seasons, however, have seen diminishing results. Maybe it’s because Too Hot is easier to make (throw a bunch of hotties on an island for a couple weeks) than Love Is Blind, which means it comes out more frequently. With Love Is Blind, absence makes the heart grow fonder. With Too Hot, maybe familiarity breeds contempt.

It’s almost not even worth analyzing Indian Matchmaking’s stats compared to Love Is Blind and Too Hot because they are fundamentally different shows and they evoke a different kind of relationship with the audience. Indian Matchmaking and Love on the Spectrum aren’t competition shows, nor are they bizarre social experiments. They seek to document love, or rather courtship, as it already exists in the real world. Therefore it’s more likely that viewers watch those shows passively, taking in the stories and learning.

There’s a game show element to Love Is Blind and the like, where viewers actively root for and against certain people or couples. Those shows require active viewing, and active viewing involves cyber-sleuthing and following and commenting and tweeting and etc. It’s no wonder why the search traffic is so much higher for The Ultimatum, Too Hot, and Love Is Blind. That’s bad news for Dated and Related, though, which presumably should have been as big a hit as the most recent seasons of Too Hot to Handle at least. It failed to catch on, though. Maybe that’s because the premise, where siblings pick people to go on dates with their sibling, was too convoluted. Or maybe giving the show a title that alludes to incest wasn’t the smartest idea…? Netflix hasn’t announced a second season of the show.

As for the rest of the lineup:

• Love on the Spectrum: U.S. won three Emmys, including the trophy for Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program, and will return for Season 2.
• Indian Matchmaking Season 3 premieres in spring 2023. It will be joined by the premiere of another dating show, Jewish Matchmaking.
• The Ultimatum, 2022’s breakout hit at least where this lineup is concerned, has two new seasons coming in 2023. In addition to a second season of The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, a spinoff — The Ultimatum: Queer Love — will put women and non-binary individuals through the Ultimatum wringer. Other spinoffs set in France and South Africa have been ordered.
• The future of Too Hot to Handle is lukewarm right now. It hasn’t been renewed beyond the just-wrapped Season 4, and the future of its spinoff Too Hot to Handle: Brazil also remains TBD. But then again, a German spinoff is in the works.
• Love Is Blind Seasons 4 and 5 are on the way. Love Is Blind: Brazil Season 2 premieres on December 28 and it’s already been renewed for Season 3.

Overall, Netflix’s mission to launch a year-round reality romance schedule worked in that, yes, they did release reality romance content all year. They really backed off from branding all of these shows as part of a cohesive strategy right after they announced the “Love Has No Off Season” initiative. But then again, Netflix has so much going on all the time, it’s maybe foolish to expect them to stick to a brand for longer than 3:25.

As far as launching new hits or cementing existing shows as consistent performers, the results of this experiment were way more chaotic. The Ultimatum had a big debut, but we’ll have to see if the series wears out its welcome when two more seasons hit next year. Dated and Related was DOA. Love on the Spectrum can win Emmys, but it’s not going to become a phenomenon like Love Is Blind. And Too Hot to Handle’s time in the sun could be coming to an end. One thing’s for sure: 2023 is gonna bring a whole lot more love to Netflix — just don’t expect Netflix to put a ring on any one branding idea again.