LOS ANGELES – Love isn’t patient, love isn’t kind – at least if you ask the fans of Netflix’s Love Is Blind. Viewers had to wait more than an hour to catch the season 4 reunion special, which will be streamed live on Sunday – Netflix’s second live event on its own platform.
Love Is Blind: The Live Reunion, hosted by Vanessa and Nick Lachey, was scheduled to stream from Los Angeles starting at 5 p.m. Pacific. Netflix subscribers could enter a waiting room for the show 10 minutes before its start time — and those who did were still there an hour later. The show eventually aired — apparently live — around 6:16 p.m. Pacific Time, though some Netflix users were still reporting trouble accessing the content.
“We’re sorry we’re late,” said Vanessa Lachey, the only acknowledgment of the delay early on in the show.
“To all of you who stayed up late, woke up early, gave up on your Sunday afternoon… we are incredibly sorry that the Love is Blind Live Reunion didn’t go as planned,” Netflix tweeted at 6:29 p.m Pacific. “We’re filming it now and we’ll have it on Netflix as soon as possible. Thanks again and sorry.”
A request for comment from Netflix was not immediately answered. Netflix first live streaming event “Chris Rock: Selective Outrage” had no obvious technical difficulties.
On Twitter, Netflix had acknowledged the delay without explanation. Two minutes into the initial start time, it promised the special would take place in 15 minutes. Seven minutes later, the company tweeted, “Promise #LoveIsBlindLIVE will be worth the wait…” along with a picture of one of the season’s “villains.”
The account’s most recent activity was a retweet by US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who made a joke about the delay. As the special’s original closing time neared, nothing had been posted since – and remained so even after the show aired for some, until the apology tweet.
Before the show finally aired, Vanessa Lachey had gone from the set to Instagram — briefly live, perhaps ironically — to try and entice viewers to stay, stating the delay was a technical issue in a post in Thanking fans for their patience, she captioned, “Apparently we broke the internet!”
“It’s so 2023,” she said.
Cast members from the Seattle-based season also took to the social media platform to joke about the delay. Marshall Glaze posted a picture of a man examining a bunch of wires: “I’ll try y’all,” he tweeted.
Competing streamers and networks also poked fun at the drama.
“We Would Never Keep You Waiting To See You Again,” BravoTV – Home Of Lots Of Messy Reunion Specials – tweeted with a winking face.
“Hmm,” read a screencap featuring Kerry Washington tweeted by Hulu.
While chaos dominated Twitter’s trending topics, the end of the hour brought a significant threat to Netflix’s dominance of the discourse: the latest episode of HBO’s “Succession” is now streaming.
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Associated Press journalists Beatrice Dupuy, Alicia Rancilio and Mallika Sen contributed to this report.
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