Between Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing and the forthcoming series of I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, this autumn is already heating up to be the golden era of reality television. Over on Netflix – and fresh on the heels of the UK version – season 7 of dating programme Love Is Blind has arrived, with a whole new group of singletons taking part in a social experiment where they must fall in love without seeing their partner.
The first six episodes of season seven dropped on Netflix last week, and concluded with seven couples getting engaged and meeting face-to-face for the first time before heading off to Cabo together. However, it was then revealed that one of the couples, Brittany Wisniewski and Leo Braudy, didn’t go on the trip.
In episode five, a card was shown mid-way through the episode reading, ‘Brittany and Leo were not one of the six couples chosen by producers to continue their journey in Mexico,’ it read. ‘They took their own trip to Mexico and broke off their engagement weeks later.’ This led to viewers questioning why the pair hadn’t been ‘chosen by producers’ and been cut out of the show.
Who are Love Is Blind's Brittany and Leo?
Brittany Wisniewski is an author and the co-founder of an environmental and wellness organisation who appeared on Love Is Blind season seven. In the pods, she formed a connection with art dealer Leo Braudy, who gained a lot of flack from viewers for speaking about how much money he made in his 'interesting and lucrative job'. 'I grew up financially very well-off,' he said in the first episode. 'I’m a rich f*cking art dealer. I grew up, I went to a country club, went to private school. My college was paid for.'
While the couple connected immediately, they faced a bump in the road after their proposal. Outside the pods, Leo began showing an interest in fellow contestant Hannah Jiles.
Why didn’t Brittany and Leo go to Cabo on Love Is Blind?
According to the team behind Love Is Blind, Brittany and Leo’s exclusion from the Cabo trip simply came down to logistics. The show doesn’t follow all the couples who say ‘I do’ in the pods – although this is the first time a couple’s dating story has been shown, only for them to not continue any further on the show.
Speaking in an interview around the season launch, show creator and executive producer Chris Coelen explained in an interview that, as the show’s storyline was created along the way, they didn’t know what was going to happen on Love Is Blind until they got there. ‘We have the budget to follow five couples and sometimes we stretch to six couples, and we figure out how to stack our crews,’ he told Variety.
The reason Brittany and Leo didn’t get chosen, Chris explained, was that the team felt they were the least ‘authentic’ and likely to make it down the aisle. After all, of all the couples to get engaged, Brittany was the only one not to say ‘I love you’ back to her fiancé.
‘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?’ Chris explained. ‘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.’
Neither Brittany or Leo have yet commented on what happened post-pods - but we have a feeling this isn't the last we've heard of them...