On day one of shooting season five of Love Is Blind, a junior staffer walked into the control room and told executive producers Chris Coelen and Ally Simpson, who oversee every aspect of the popular Netflix dating series, that there was a problem. “There’s two people who know each other and appear to have had a relationship of some sort,” the staffer said to them. In the show’s short but relatively iconic run, this was a first.
Coelen and Simpson’s initial instinct was to send the participants home. “We said, look, the essence of the experiment is that you get to know someone without knowing anything about them in the material world,” Coelen told them. “We don’t know how we can keep you here.” The show, which attempts to pair 30 men and women together over the course of seven weeks, testing their compatibility and emotional endurance with the sole intention of…
