Reality TV Is Better for Love on the Spectrum

Photo: B) 2025 Netflix, Inc.

Love on the Spectrum is already an Emmy winner, having taken the Outstanding Unstructured Reality Series trophy back in 2022. But its most recent season seems to have broken out significantly, with couples updates in People and original (Emmy-eligible!) songs performed on The Kelly Clarkson Show. The series, which follows a handful of recurring neurodivergent cast members navigating dating and relationships, has been a hugely popular hit for Netflix, with season three debuting in the streamer’s top ten back in April. Today, clips from the show are ever-present on social-media platforms, especially TikTok.

“The response to the series just keeps getting stronger and stronger, which is a really rare thing in the unscripted world,” says Cian O’Clery, its co-creator — with Karina Holden — and director. (He’s the voice you hear interacting with the cast members as they film.) “It’s great to see not just people like Abbey and David, who first met in season one and are now celebrating their third anniversary in season three, but also people like Connor, who really changes and develops. Back then he’d sit at home with the dogs and the only people who would message his phone were family. Now, people love him all around the world. He’s really come into his own and become a more confident person as well as — spoiler alert — found love.”

Atlanta’s Connor Tomlinson is indeed a favorite. With his vocabulary and euphemisms clearly formed by his affinity for fantasy fiction and medieval tales of knights and kings, Connor strikes an indelible impression on the show. His mom Lise, his siblings, and their dogs form a support system that is part council and part hype squad; when Connor brings home prospective love interest Georgie, he warns them to not go overboard. “In terms of recurring cast members, I’m rooting hardest for Connor and Georgie.” Vulture’s senior news writer Fran Hoepfner tells me, “Watching Connor grow in confidence and ease when seated across from another person on a date has been wonderful to witness, and Georgie is an undeniably charmer, ever-patient and just as funny as Connor.”

Love on the Spectrum manages to exist in two forms at once: It’s a dating show and a lifestyle show. Where other popular dating shows like The Bachelor and Love Island  certainly try to get their audiences invested in their romantic storylines, their core identity as competitions keep the audience on some level guarded and often oppositional to the talent on screen. They also keep their cast members more limited in the ways in which they’re allowed to find, pursue, and even reject love. When a Bachelor/ette ultimately decides to go back on their final decision or even chooses no one, it can be front-page Us Weekly news. Love in the Spectrum isn’t exactly free-range dating — dates are set up by the show, followed up on (no fear of ghosting), and dissected by participants — but there is no compulsory finish line. This is why Love on the Spectrum competes in Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program at the Emmys, alongside a motley crew of two-time defending champ Welcome to Wrexham, Vanderpump Rules, and RuPaul’s Drag Race: Untucked, rather than Reality Competition.

The format of Love on the Spectrum gives the series an advantage: The open-ended nature of its encounters, combined with its depictions of cast members’ growth and support systems, gets the audience invested in their dating lives on a far deeper level than most dating shows. By embedding viewers not just in cast members’ dates but the degree of preparation and support that goes into them — and subsequently for some, the relationships — Love on the Spectrum practically invites the audience to become part of that support system built around the cast. This even extends to the non-regulars whose dates don’t work out. I found myself locked in on new cast member Madison’s search for someone who meets her outgoingness and ambition, but I still left the episode that featured her date with Brandon (who was so overwhelmed by the loud restaurant that he couldn’t pick his head off of the table) thinking more about where his romantic life is headed than I ever would about a garden-variety rejectee on a dating show.

“The destigmatization around a ‘bad’ date feels refreshing,” Hoepfner says, “especially because in real life, most bad dates are bad for mundane reasons and not ‘can you believe this shit?’ reasons. Part of what I admire about the show is the way it emphasizes that being in a relationship is not necessarily better than being single if the match just isn’t right. We get a lot of that with Dani and Adan this season, who have really hit a rut in communication despite being together for a year. They’re an interesting case study because they went on a date in a previous season and Dani wasn’t initially that interested, only to change her mind and try again. This also happened to Connor last season as well. That’s not really something production can anticipate: second-guessing.”

One unavoidable element to watching (and considering the awards case for) Love on the Spectrum in 2025 is the current political climate, with new Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spewing misinformation about autism and the population’s trust in our health systems distressingly low. For O’Clery, the answer to the question of politics is representation and familiarity. “The great opportunity that we have as producers in making this series is to be able to introduce people to a really diverse range of people, all whom are on the spectrum, but all whom are so very different in their personalities, in the way they see the world, in the way they interact with other people.”

And yet politics, as ever, does tend to find a way. “What we see are a number of loving, supportive families — doing what they can to encourage their kids or siblings or roommates to pursue love and dating independently,” Hoepfner tells me. “In and of itself, that’s pretty apolitical, but there’s always been inherent politics to the show around destigmatization in the present tense. I was compelled by the moment Tina mentions that she tries not to label her autism as Asperger’s ‘because of the Nazi.’” Recently, Love on the Spectrum stars Dani Bowman and James B. Jones spoke out against RFK Jr.’s misinformation spree, but there are also ever-vigilant Redditors and TikTokkers trying to sleuth out anti-vax sentiments from the cast members’ families. “I’ve seen a bit of a small uproar on TikTok where people are worried that some of these family members are acting against their own children’s interests in believing that,” Hoepfner notes. “While that may be true, those beliefs don’t find any purchase on the show, so perhaps Love on the Spectrum’s greatest asset is in what its neurodivergent cast members show us rather than what their parents are being told.”

That’s ultimately the magic trick of Love on the Spectrum: It uses the superstructure of a dating show to stoke your empathy for everyone on screen. It’s why I find it so funny that its competition for Emmys are shows like Selling Sunset and Vanderpump Rules and Below Deck — series that give their audiences permission to empathize with no one and rather, let judgment fly. Politically, the best thing Love on the Spectrum can do is let its audience peer into this small portion of its cast members’ lives.

As of now, the Unstructured Reality Series award is presented at the Creative Arts Emmys and not on the main Emmys telecast, where the Reality Competition Series resides. Given the increased popularity of Love on the Spectrum and its fellow Unstructured shows, might Cian O’Clery find it appropriate to bump Unstructured Reality up to the big show? “Even being able to be invited to the Emmys and be nominated is such a big honor and not anything we had ever considered,” O’Clery says. “When we made season one, it was like, ‘Hang on, we’re at the Creative Arts Emmys!’ We’re just these little Australians making this show, so we’re just happy to be part of the conversation. But now that you mention it, yeah, it would be fun to go to the — what do you call it? The celebrity one?”