Why Love Is Blind Unfollowed Leo and Brittany After Pods

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the first six episodes of the seventh season of Love Is Blind, 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 brought 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 showed they weren't selected.

“Brittany and Leo were not among the six couples selected by producers to continue their journey in Mexico,” read the card shown midway through the fifth episode. “They took their own trip to Mexico and called off their engagement weeks later.”

So the question arises: Why introduce them in the series at all and then not follow them? Creator and executive producer Chris Coelen has the answer.

“There are different ways to produce shows without a script. Sometimes while you're filming you have an idea of ​​where things are going. And we don't do that. We film everything as it happens and at the end we reconstruct how we got there,” says Coelen, founder and CEO of Kinetic Content diversity. “We have the budget to accompany five couples, and sometimes we expand it to six couples, and we figure out how to put our crews together.”

This season, seven couples got engaged, meaning one had to be cut.

“As we make the decision about who to follow, and as we have more couples who are engaged, we make a decision about which couples we consider to be authentic,” he explains. “And when I say authentic, I mean the highest probability of actually standing at the altar and saying I do. Who is really really on this path? We felt at the time that the six couples we ended up following were the ones who, on a gut level, felt more like they had a real chance to say “I do” – that they really cared was able to say “Yes, I do.” ” The couple that I thought had the least chance of doing this was Leo and Brittany. That’s why we decided to stop following them after the groups ended.”

It's important to note that out of everyone, Brittany was the only one who didn't say “I love you” back to her fiancé.

Their stories were closely linked to those of the other actors and producers did follow – namely Hannah Jiles and Nick Dorka. Leo was torn between Hannah and Brittany; Hannah initially wanted to pursue Leo more closely, but ultimately chose Nick.

“As we followed Hannah and Nick, you start to realize that 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. “That’s how we told their story. They are extremely interesting people and then we just had to admit to ourselves that we made the decision not to follow them. Our gut decisions were right all along. Anyone we don't follow or who left the experiment never got together. This is certainly what happened to them. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be interesting to follow, it just ended up where we expected it to.”

All performers are informed that they may not be selected to be pursued and therefore may not travel to Mexico for the post-show trip. In this case, Brittany and Leo decided that since they weren't chosen, they would take their own trip to Miami.

“I think they’ll definitely be at the reunion,” Coelen says. “And maybe one day we’ll actually follow more (couples) into the real world. I would like that, it’s just complicated and there’s a lot to tell.”

Love Is Blind episodes 1-6 are now streaming on Netflix. Episodes 7-9 begin airing on October 9th.