By just about any measure, Love Is Blind Season 2 was a massive success.
For starters, two couples got married just weeks after meeting each other, and they’re still together months after filming wrapped!
Compare that to the Bachelor franchise — with its much bigger budget and far more traditional premise — which has been unable to bring even one couple to the altar in recent years.
But more importantly to the show’s future, LiB has ironed out the kinks from its first season — which were considerable — to become the most mature and compelling of all the current realty dating shows.
Of course, the series still had its problems in Season 2, and the biggest one was named Shake Chatterjee.
If you watched the show, then you know that Chatterjee wasn’t attracted to fiancee Deepti Vempati.
In fact, you might know that even if you didn’t watch, because dude went out of his way to tell the entire freakin’ world!
Shake could’ve simply broken it off with Deepti at any time, but instead, he strung her along and generally undermined the whole “experiment” for everyone involved.
On the Love Is Blind Season 2 reunion, Shake butted heads with the hosts and the entire cast, many of whom complained that he appeared to miss the point of the show entirely.
Many viewers echoed that complaint, and now, the show’s creator, Chris Coelen, has addressed these criticisms in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“Listen, we vet people coming into the show. It’s not an infallible process. I’m not unhappy that Shake made it onto the show,” Coelen told the outlet.
“The intention is that you invite into the pods people who go through a pretty rigorous process to be chosen, and they have a stated intention of being serious about finding someone.”
Coelen stated that while he has the deepest sympathy for the humiliation that Deepti endured, he has no regrets about casting Shake.
In the end of course, even the most experienced producers can’t predict how the “talent” will behave once the cameras start rolling.
“Am I unhappy about it? No, I’m not unhappy about it,” Coelen continued.
“I’m certainly unhappy that Deepti didn’t get the happy ending that she wanted there, but I think even talking to Deepti after the fact, she has felt she has grown tremendously through this experience as a person, and I’m really happy about that,” he continued.
“I’m happy for her. I’m hoping that Shake will feel the same way at some point, if he doesn’t already.”
Coelen went on to explain that all cast members are carefully vetted.
But he acknowledged that despite the rigorous process, sometimes, someone like Shake just slips through the cracks.
“We certainly vet people, and we do psychological testing—we do background checks and all of that—but we want to invite a broad array of people into the pods,” he said.
“Let’s say I thought that somebody was a jerk and a chauvinist. I am not making the decision,” Coelen added.
“If you look at Shake and Deepti, Deepti chose Shake—I didn’t choose Shake for her. She chose him, and in that way, it’s very reflective of the real world.”
These days, Shake has a new girlfriend, and Deepti is rumored to be dating LiB co-star Kyle Abrams, so we suppose it all worked out in the end.
And the drama certainly hasn’t done any serious damage to Netflix’s most popular reality show.
Despite the occasional bump in the road caused by bad actors like Shake, the LiB franchise shows no signs of slowing down.
Love Is Blind Season 3 has already been filmed, and Netflix says the new episodes will air sometime before the end of 2022.
Not only that, the show has been renewed through season 5!
Shake might have shaken things up during his time on the show.
But it looks like LiB will have no trouble trucking right along without him!