Netflix screwed the pooch on a live reunion that was heavily promoted — as it turns out, the episode is gonna be taped and aired with a delay … but it’s unclear what the hold-up was.
Of course, we’re talking about ‘Love Is Blind‘ … the fourth season of which just recently wrapped and whose big postmortem episode was advertised as a live event on the streaming service which was set to premiere on Sunday evening. That never happened, though.
When the expected air time hit — 8 PM ET — there were mass reports of an error code that was popping up on Netflix … and the live reunion simply never came, after hours of waiting.
People kept refreshing to see if it was an issue on their end … but it wasn’t. Netflix just wasn’t ready to get the cameras rolling, and a proper explanation was never really offered as to why the show hadn’t gotten rolling yet … Netflix just kept saying they’d be on soon.
Love Is Blind: The Reunion will be available globally at 12pm PT on April 17. Promise. pic.twitter.com/vHKxyOiSgq
— Netflix (@netflix) April 17, 2023
@netflix
Some assumed it was technical difficulties, but it doesn’t sound like that’s the case. In the end, Netflix said it was starting to film around 9:30 PM ET … and that the episode would be aired the following day (Monday) at 3 PM ET.
Netflix apologized to fans, writing … “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.” They added, “We’re filming it now and we’ll have it on Netflix as soon as humanly possible. Again, thank you and sorry.”
In the interim … questions, outrage and jokes were flying — all at Netflix’s expense. Folks were legitimately wondering what went wrong … and it seems some actually stayed up quite late waiting for the reunion to upload. The discourse even roped in some big-time names … like AOC, for example, who chimed in and made a crack about one of the castmates.
Some of Netflix’s own competition also weighed in and crapped on them … like Blockbuster, Redbox and even Hulu. A lot of publicity, obviously — but for all the wrong reasons.
In short, the ‘LIB’ live reunion turned out to be a disaster for Netflix … which is embarrassing considering how much confidence they had in all their promos leading up to it.
Remember, they just started dabbling in live programming with the Chris Rock special. That went off without a hitch, but their second attempt crashed and burned … so, back to the batter’s box, it seems.