Sunday night’s eagerly anticipated reunion special for the fourth season of “Love Is Blind” failed to stream live as scheduled on Netflix amid technical glitches. The streaming giant on Monday morning announced that the show – its second live event – would air later in the day.
The social media blowback was fast and furious when the program failed to load for viewers at the promised 8 p.m. EDT start time. “Love is … late,” Netflix’s official Twitter account offered following the unexpected delay in a now-deleted tweet.
Subscribers who joined a waiting room to tune in for the dating show, hosted by Vanessa and Nick Lachey, were still there an hour later.
“To everyone who stayed up late, woke up early, gave up their Sunday afternoon… we are incredibly sorry that the Love is Blind Live Reunion did not turn out as we had planned,” Netflix later tweeted. “We’re filming it now and we’ll have it on Netflix as soon as humanly possible. Again, thank you and sorry.
Andy Cohen, a seasoned veteran of reality TV reunions, weighed in on the embarrassing debacle.
“Live reunions are a very bad idea,” the former Bravo TV executive said, referencing the ill-fated season 1 reunion of “The Real Housewives of Miami.” “There is a reason we don’t do reunions live.”
Cohen, who has hosted countless reality TV reunion shows, says it takes a minute to get the drama percolating on those must-watch reunion specials.
There is a lot of grist to go through before you get to the prime beef,” he explained during Monday’s episode of “Andy Cohen Live” on SiriusXM. “And there is a reason they’re edited down. We could talk about a topic on a reunion taping for 25 minutes, for 45 minutes before really getting to the heart of something.”
The former CBS News producer cited the most recent reunion of the “Real Housewives of New Jersey” as a prime example.
“At the last Jersey reunion… I brought up the fact that Melissa [Gorga] wasn’t a bridesmaid. Like it wasn’t on the question card, it just came up. It wound up creating like an hour of strife and drama and stuff that was really important,” he revealed. “So … reunion shows are almost like a fishing expedition.”
“Love Is Blind,” created by Chris Coelen, has been described as a social experiment where single men and women look for love and get engaged, all before meeting in person. After it launched during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, Netflix reported 30 million households watched the series within its first four weeks.
Last month, Netflix’s first live streaming event, “Chris Rock: Selective Outrage,” did not feature any apparent technical difficulties and went on as scheduled.