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Netflix, baby… we were rooting for you! We were all rooting for you! How dare you!
As we all settled onto our couches just before 8 PM on Sunday night, we expected to click into the red “watch live” button at the top of our Netflix apps and be greeted by the Lacheys (more on them later) welcoming us to the season 4 “Love Is Blind” reunion. Instead, we either got kicked out, shown an error message or left on a waiting screen that we just never got out of. Was it just your TV? Were you the only one not witnessing Irina’s mea culpa in real time? With one peek at Twitter, we all realized that we were in this together. The reunion hadn’t begun. Technical difficulties all around.
I do have to say that there was something comforting about everyone turning to Twitter not just for updates but also to roast the biggest streaming platform in the world for not being able to deliver a working live stream. As many people have pointed out, it was ironic that the company purported to be killing traditional TV and ushering in a premium streaming experience couldn’t figure out how to do exactly what it was supposedly not just replacing but improving upon. The memes were quick and hilarious and it felt like we were all trauma bonding over something extremely silly. The hype was high, but the stakes were low. And for all of the handwringing about the demise of Twitter and what could eventually replace it, this was a prime example of Twitter still serving a universal purpose. It’s where we go to experience real-time media events together, to see if it’s just us, to commiserate about something when we confirm it’s affecting all of us and then, usually, we laugh about it.
Anyway, Netflix first tweeted that the reunion would start 15 minutes late. Then it was coming! Hold tight! Vanessa Lachey told us on Instagram Live not to change the channel, but she clearly didn’t know what she was talking about. We all had a new episode of “Succession” to watch at 9, honey. After everyone who didn’t watch last week’s episode live complained about that big death being spoiled, did they really think people were going to stick around for over an hour for this? Please. Sunday night TV schedules are tight these days, and if you fuck with that, then we’re moving on.
After about an hour during which we all mortifyingly kept that error screen up, scrolled through the memes and blew up our group chats, Netflix announced that they were recording the reunion and would release it as soon as “humanly possible.” Whatever that means. I switched to “Succession” along with everyone else.
While I expressed excitement over this reunion being broadcast live in primetime on Sunday night, that was more for the eventizing of it all. The prospect of watching something we were all looking forward to together — especially when we generally have no idea if any of these couples broke up or not — was exciting! Netflix’s drop-everything-now release model usually results in fractured viewing. You may have binged the entire new season of “Dead to Me” in a day, but I spread it out over the course of a week. That creates confusion over when we can talk about it. It’s not as fun, and Netflix changing that up was cool. But, now that we saw how the whole thing went down, that same effect could’ve been achieved if they’d just released a pre-recorded, pre-edited reunion special at 8 PM on a Sunday night. It didn’t need to be live. (And it didn’t need that Jerry Springer-ass studio audience, either.)
As the king of reality TV reunions Andy Cohen said on his radio show the next day, there’s a reason why Bravo doesn’t do their reunions live. Their tapings are famously close to 10 or 12 hours long and ultimately get edited down to two to four hour-long episodes. That’s a lot that gets left on the cutting room floor, but for good reason — it can take some time for a host to get what they want out of the talent. There’s a lot of meandering before they get to the meat of an issue. Not only that, but when you’re airing something live or uncut or both, you miss some of the best parts of reunions: reaction shots, captioned whispers between stars while someone else is talking, even the occasional split screen. Like, remember when they showed Zack whispering to Paul and Vanessa asked him what he’d said? He sort of told us, but not really. On a “Real Housewives” reunion, Andy doesn’t even have to ask — the editors caption those moments for us. But, yeah, we got none of that with this “Love Is Blind” reunion and that’s part of the reason that it fell so flat.
Of course, it was bound to fall flat regardless. It was already hyped up pre-delay, but then the delay forced us to wait that much longer, whetting our appetites that much more. So close, yet so far. But then the taping happened, and some people were somehow still able to watch it live? People were live streaming it on TikTok. This meant, of course, that the fates of this season’s couples leaked. The surprise element of the reunions — the main reason we even watch these things to begin with — was spoiled. We knew that Jackie was a no-show, that Micah and Paul did indeed break up and that Kwame was somehow still with Chelsea. Okay, then.
The other big reason why this reunion ultimately disappointed? The hosts. I’ve never really understood why “Love Is Blind” even has hosts, to be honest. They show up, what? Three times? To kick things off in the pods, to welcome them to Mexico and then to go wedding dress shopping? To hire Nick and Vanessa Lachey to serve as hosts feels unnecessary, and I’d argue that their level of fame actually sets up an expectation that they’ll contribute more to the show than they ever actually do. I get the vibe that they’re there partially because they want the contestants and the viewers to see them as a picture of, like, what we should all strive for, which is kind of hilarious. Truly no shade — good for them for being married for 12 years! — but I’m pretty sure that when people think of the ultimate, happy couple, nobody thinks of Nick and Vanessa Lachey.
Regardless, as hosts of the show, they moderate the reunions. Well, Vanessa does. Nick barely says a word, which results in the viewer noticing Vanessa’s hosting style that much more. A lot of people found her to be biased towards the women, selectively aggressive with some of the men and bizarrely obsessed with asking them all when they’re planning on having babies. I agree with all of that. To me, it was most apparent when she did her virtual sit-down with Jackie and Josh and proved to be weirdly sympathetic to them. She barely challenged them on anything, despite the sketchy timeline of how they got together, despite Jackie being one of the biggest villains of the season, despite them not bothering to show up but still saying something like they’re the type of people who, if they’re going to say something, they’re going to say it to your face.
And then she turns to Marshall, who did show up and didn’t give them the reaction they wanted, and asked him to put Jackie’s feelings into consideration? You’ve got to be kidding me. I actually think that the subtext of how Vanessa treated Marshall at the reunion is that she was offended at how dismissive he was at her cakewalk of an interview with Jackie and Josh. She took his facial expressions as a personal shot at her interviewing skills, so she took it out on him. Remember how many times she mentioned how he’d said he “couldn’t remember” the video package? She thought she’d done something and, when he failed to validate that, it pissed her off. She felt disrespected by him. At the end of the reunion, when she asked if anyone else had closing thoughts and Marshall expressed that this experience shouldn’t be all about the drama, she felt the need to shut that down, too, saying that there is drama in marriage. Girl, please. You know what he meant!
It was also misguided for her to go so hard on Paul (who she later apologized to). While I agree that he needed to answer for his comment about not being able to see Micah as a mother, I thought that he owned up to it and I believed his explanation about it being a poorly worded way of something that he couldn’t see them being parents together. But Vanessa couldn’t seem to let it go, and thus went easy on Micah, who was a true chaos agent on this season. Vanessa kept using her heightened position as host to guide the conversation against Paul and Marshall and into a more sympathetic space for Micah, Jackie and even Irina. I’m all for forgiveness and having empathy for some of the people that got piled on by the internet as the season aired. That can’t be easy to experience, but it’s also the consequence of behaving badly on reality TV in 2023. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. If she’d made them truly answer for their behavior at the reunion and then provided a warmer environment for them to ask for forgiveness, that would’ve been much better received. But she showed her cards too easily, so that’s not how it went down.
My read on it is that she views her position as host of the show as a way to advocate for women. Which, great! She seems to want to give the young women on this show the space to be on equal ground with their male counterparts, and I’m all for that. But the way she went about it on this reunion felt particularly charged and misdirected. And then for her to spend the final 15 minutes of the reunion badgering them about when they’re going to have babies completely erased her mission. It felt really icky of her to get so stuck on them making her a happy “Auntie Vanessa” by popping out babies, as if that’s a foregone conclusion or they’re behind schedule on becoming parents or that it’s going to be a breeze for all of them. The whole thing felt antiquated.
And then for them to cut to Bartise of all people introducing us to his newborn baby? Literally zero people asked for that.
The biggest surprise of the reunion, as far as I was concerned, was that Kwame and Chelsea were still together. The whole segment about Kwame and Micah’s inappropriate interactions once they got out of the pods featured a lot of revisionist history, and it just feels like everyone in that scenario is seeing what they want to see and ignoring the rest. As for Micah, my read on her is still that she’s the one that really came into this wanting to be famous. She stuck with Paul to maximize her screen time (and, thus, her follower count), and she always planned on having a big capital-M Moment at the wedding. The issue is that she didn’t realize how badly she was going to come across on TV. She probably thought she was being funny (and not mean) in the pods and that the audience was going to be on her side of things when she stormed out of her wedding after getting her heart “broken.” She was never going to say yes, as far as I see it, and her subdued demeanor at the reunion reflected that she miscalculated this entire experience was going to go for her.
On a positive note, Brett and Tiffany remain as lovely and adorable as ever. They didn’t get much speaking time on the reunion, which is perhaps the best sign possible for their relationship. No drama to speak of there! Zack and Bliss were cute, too. It’s kind of hilarious that he and her dad are “best buds” now, and he’s paying for their honeymoon for Panama. Someone must feel badly for how horribly he came off on the show, huh? If you haven’t read Zack’s “receipts” that he posted on Instagram yet, I definitely recommend taking the time to do so. It’ll give you a much bigger appreciation for him as a person.
Those are most of my thoughts on this disaster of a “Love Is Blind” not-live reunion. My hope is that Netflix learns from this and that they still release the reunion in primetime on a Sunday night but just… not live. They did create a moment, it just wasn’t the moment they wanted. For better or worse, we’ll all remember the night we watched an error message on Netflix for an hour waiting for this damn thing to start.
The other hope is that Vanessa and Nick Lachey are not the hosts of the next reunion. Leave them on the show for all I care (as I mentioned earlier, they make little to no impact), but substitute someone else in for the reunion special. Plenty of people online have ideas, and the most common one seems to be Lauren and Cameron from season 1 of “Love Is Blind,” which I would totally endorse. They know what this experience is really like, their level of #CoupleGoals is much higher than the Lacheys’ and we’re actually invested in them as a couple. I hope to see them next season.
I think Nina Parker would be a great host for LIB
Spot on as usual!