The streaming service, which was making a rare foray into live content, left fans hanging for more than an hour as they signed in to watch a highly anticipated reunion episode.
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By Matt Stevens and Julia Jacobs
A highly anticipated episode capping the fourth season of “Love Is Blind,” a buzzy reality dating show, was delayed on Netflix by more than an hour on Sunday night, an embarrassing blunder for a streaming service that has been experimenting with live programming.
“We are so sorry we’re late,” Vanessa Lachey, who co-hosts the show with her husband Nick Lachey, said when the show finally began. “We are no longer live, but we are now finally here.”
It was Netflix's second foray into streaming programs live; last month it streamed Chris Rock’s live stand-up comedy special in which he joked about Will Smith slapping him at the Oscars last year. The program’s ratings success helped fuel interest in more experimentation with livestreaming.
The special — a reunion episode which, in typical reality-show fashion, was designed to rehash the drama of the season and update curious fans on participants’ lives — had been scheduled to air at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday night. In a tweet just as it was supposed to begin, Netflix promised it would start within 15 minutes. But as the clock ticked past 9 p.m., and the hit drama “Succession” began on H.B.O., the reunion episode had still not started.
“There is an issue with the livestream,” a message from Netflix read.
For the live reunion special, Netflix brought on a different company than the one that has produced the last four seasons of the dating show. Sunday’s program was produced by Embassy Row, with Brandon Monk and Michael Davies as executive producers.
Over the span of three years and four seasons, “Love Is Blind" has become one of Netflix’s most popular and well-known franchises, drawing tens of millions of viewers. Netflix’s struggles to air the planned reunion episode — which was expected to include appearances from singles who stirred up an unusual amount of drama during the season — drew the attention of viewers who joked about the delays with snipes about the show and its talent, with one user tweeting that Netflix would get DVDs of the reunion to subscribers by mail.
Some of Netflix’s competitors seized on the chance for schadenfreude. Bravo, a reality TV veteran that airs “The Real Housewives,” tweeted: “We would never keep you waiting for a Reunion.”
Even Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighed in.
“Someone call Lucia the seamstress to fix this,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, referring to a tailor who helped fix one of the “Love Is Blind” groom’s pants just before he was about to get married on the current season of the show. (Part of the reunion’s allure involved finding out whether the marriages of the show’s contestants, who had agreed to get married without ever having seen each other, had actually stuck.)
In a live video from the set of the show, Vanessa Lachey pleaded with fans to keep their attention on Netflix as the show was held in limbo, saying, “Don’t turn the channel. Don’t stream something else.”
“Apparently y’all, everybody broke the internet to see this reunion,” she said, at one point turning the phone to show the live audience. “So we are ready to roll. We just got to figure this out.”
The event began for some viewers after 9 p.m. And even after the episode aired, some users experienced technical glitches.
“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 tweeted around 9:30 p.m. “We’re filming it now and we’ll have it on Netflix as soon as humanly possible. Again, thank you and sorry.”
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