Love Is Blind reunion review: Not really worth the wait
Love Is Blind
- TV Show
"All of you at home, you haven't missed a thing!"
Such was the promise from co-host Vanessa Lachey at the beginning of Monday's Love Is Blind special. And she wasn't wrong. The season 4 reunion of Netflix's hit dating show was bloated, haphazard, and short on true drama.
But here's the thing: So are most reality TV reunions! Unfortunately, the Love Is Blind special felt particularly underwhelming after Sunday night's technical disaster. Netflix accidentally performed the reverse alchemy of turning a fizzy and fun communal celebration of trashy reality TV into a run-of-the-mill reunion slog.
What a thrill, to press "play" and have Love Is Blind: The Reunion actually start playing. But my endorphin rush was short-lived upon seeing the run time: 96 minutes. I suppose it shouldn't have been a surprise, given that producers had the "storylines" of six couples — and three love triangles — to cover. (The Bachelor only has one man and a handful of "real" couples by reunion time, and those Women Tell All specials are almost as ridiculously long.)
As every soap opera writer will tell you, happy couples make for boring stories — which is why the Love Is Blind producers front-loaded the reunion with updates on the smug marrieds. Netflix no doubt wants a 100-percent completion rate on this special, and so they made us wait for any fireworks. Indeed, it took about 11 minutes of happily-ever-after updates — Chelsea finally met Kwame's mom, and she welcomed her with "open arms"! Bliss' dad is now "best buds" with Zack! Tiffany and Brett are still living the "fairy tale"! — before anything of real interest happened.
When Vanessa and her mostly dead-weight co-host (what's his name again?) finally got around to discussing some of the more acrimonious developments of the season, they had trouble engaging all the key players in the conversation. It wasn't until around five minutes into the segment about the Chelsea-Kwame-Micah love triangle that either host even asked Micah a question. Micah barely spoke for the first half of the reunion, and instead just jiggled her leg out of boredom, anxiety, frustration — or possibly all three. Later, when Vanessa asked her point-blank if she and Paul would be married today if he had said yes, Micah, caught off guard, burst into tears. "Sorry, all the pressure's been off me so I kind of forgot I was here!" (As did the hosts, apparently.)
Thirty minutes in, we got the first real must-see moment: The arrival of mean girl Irina. Like all good reality TV villains, she immediately choked up when asked to explain her behavior. "Sorry, I just need a minute," she said, as the audience tittered. The segment delivered what we wanted: Apologies were made ("I completely treated you so poorly, Zack, and nobody deserves to be treated like that at all," said Irina, adding that she had "panic attacks" on the show); accusations were thrown ("If we're real, you went on this show to get famous," said Zack, prompting oooohs from the crowd); minor bombshells were dropped (Irina says she wanted to leave after meeting Zack in person, but producers convinced her to go to Mexico with him); BS was called out (Bliss to Irina: "You can have troubles with mental illness and that's totally valid, but then you're turning around and you're doing malicious things. It's hard to reconcile those two things").
It should have ended there, but Mr. and Mrs. Lachey (likely directed by the producers in their ears) kept this — and several other segments — going on for far too long, asking and re-asking questions that contestants had already done their best to answer. By the third time Vanessa pressed Paul to explain why he said he couldn't see Micah as a mom, the environmental scientist was out of words. "It's a little bit ineffable," he said with a sigh. (I'm guessing that was the first time Ms. Lachey heard that word.)
The last 20 minutes of the special was largely filler (though I will go to sleep wondering how Kwame and Chelsea manage to swing that sweet apartment with panoramic views of Seattle). Alas, what came before that filler — the most potentially explosive Love Is Blind reunion — was delivered piecemeal. Jackie and Josh, the guy she chose to be with after dumping Marshall, were allowed to do a separate interview with Vanessa via Zoom, which Marshall and the rest of the cast then had to react to after the fact. So, instead of the frisson of in-the-moment confrontation, poor Marshall — the wronged party — was left to carry the burden of that segment on his own. It's baffling to me that Netflix couldn't convince (compel?) Jackie and Josh to appear on the reunion live. Of course, we all thought they could manage a reunion special livestream — and look how that turned out. Grade: C+
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