SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the first six episodes of “Love Is Blind” Season 7, now streaming on Netflix.
“Love Is Blind” doesn’t always follow every couple who get engaged in the pods; logistically, that wouldn’t be possible. But Season 7 featured something new: For the first time, the journey of one couple — Brittany Wisniewski and Leo Braudy — was documented, from their pod conversations to their engagement and meeting. Then, a title card revealed that they weren’t chosen.
“Brittany and Leo were not one of the six couples chosen by producers to continue their journey in Mexico,” the card shown midway through the fifth episode read. “They took their own trip to Mexico and broke off their engagement weeks later.”
So, the question arises: Why feature them on the series at all and then not follow them? Creator and executive producer Chris Coelen has the answer.
“There are different ways that non-scripted shows are produced. Sometimes you have an idea of where things are going while you’re filming. And we don’t. We film everything as it happens, and then after it ends, we piece together how we got there,” Coelen, the founder and CEO of Kinetic Content, tells Variety. “We have the budget to follow five couples and sometimes we stretch to six couples, and we figure out how to stack our crews.”
This season, seven couples got engaged so one had to be cut.
“When we make that decision as to who to follow, if we have more couples that got engaged, we make a decision as to which couples we think are authentic,” he explains. “And when I say authentic, I mean most authentically likely to actually be at the altar and say I do. Who is really genuinely on that path? We felt, at the time, that the six couples we did end up following were the ones that felt more, on a gut level, had a real shot to say “I do” — that they were really invested in saying “I do.” The couple that I think we felt least likely to do that were Leo and Brittany. So, we made a decision not to follow them after the pods ended.”
Their stories were very intertwined with other cast members the producers did follow — namely Hannah Jiles and Nick Dorka. Leo was torn between Hannah and Brittany; Hannah first wanted to pursue Leo more, then ultimately went with Nick.
“You start to realize, because we did follow Hannah and Nick, Leo was such a big part of Hannah’s story. You can’t really tell Hannah’s story without telling Leo’s story, and you can’t really tell Leo’s story without telling Brittany’s story,” he explained. “So that’s how we told their story. They’re tremendously interesting people and and then we just had to own the fact that we’ve made the decision not to follow them. Our gut level decisions have been correct all the way through. Anybody that we’ve chosen not to follow or anybody that has left the experiment has never ended up together. That’s certainly what happened with them. It doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be interesting to follow, it just ended up kind of in the place that we thought it would.”
All the cast members are informed that they may not be chosen to be followed, so may not go to Mexico for the post-show trip. In this case, Brittany and Leo decided that since they weren’t chosen, they’d do their own trip to Miami.
“I think certainly they’ll be at the reunion,” Coelen says. “And maybe someday we actually will follow more [couples] into the real world. I would love that, it’s just complicated and a lot of story to to tell.”
“Love Is Blind” episodes 1-6 are now streaming on Netflix. Episodes 7-9 will begin streaming Oct. 9.