Love Is Blind Creator Defends Vetting Process After Casting Controversial Shake Chatterjee!

Every reality show needs its villain!

For Love is Blind season 2, that was Abhishek “Shake” Chatterjee, who made several less-than-appropriate comments about women’s bodies during his time on the show (despite the whole “blind” concept). Even co-host Vanessa Lachey was puzzled as to why Shake would participate in the show at all when he confessed he thought love was only “partially blind.”

But regardless of Shake’s reasons for participating, why would the show pick someone who was actually very concerned with his partner’s looks? Creator Chris Coelen touched on the subject with The Hollywood Reporter, explaining:

“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. 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. Now, they all say that none of them really expect that it’s gonna happen because there’s a high degree of skepticism when people walk into those pods. No matter how you come into it, though, you do get transformed.”

The Netflix producer claimed that he talked to Shake shortly before the big reveal, and was impressed “by what I perceived to be his emotional sort of maturation and transformation in the pods, that he had seemingly discovered things about himself in the pods that were very profound in terms of why he felt the way he did and about who he was as a person.” He went on:

“And of course, the point of view of the show is not ‘Love is blind.’ The point of the show is, actually, ‘Is love blind? Can it be blind?’ And when Shake was there and saw Deepti [Vempati] for the first time, he was very much in the mindset that, ‘Love is blind, and this is the woman that I’m gonna be with, and I have changed as a person.’ Of course, then he gets in the real world, and that’s what the show looks at. You start with love — can it survive the real world that we live in? And for him, obviously, it didn’t, and I think that’s a real story.”

In fact, Chris was “not unhappy” about any part of that particular story, except that “Deepti didn’t get the happy ending that she wanted there.” However, he did feel that she had “grown tremendously through this experience as a person” and hoped Shake would “feel the same way at some point, if he doesn’t already.”

He defended the process by saying:

“Look, our duty as producers is to tell the real story — that’s it. We have no preconceived notions: ‘Oh, we hope that it’s people who look like this or look like that, or people who have this story or that story — they find each other.’ We don’t control any of that. People have made comments like, ‘Well, the producers would like this to happen.’ Maybe we would, but we don’t ever influence it — ever. We don’t tell anybody what to say, how to feel, how to think. Whatever happens, we’re gonna follow — and by the way, that might mean nobody gets engaged. It might mean, like in season one or season two, we end up with eight engagements. We set up the machinery, and we just let it happen.”

When THR asked about finding contestants who are “worthy of this platform” and that “the audience will want to root for,” Chris responded:

“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. Let’s say I thought that somebody was a jerk and a chauvinist. I am not making the decision. 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. And she felt great about that decision when she made it, and obviously, again, the real world ended up showing them that they shouldn’t be together. My responsibility is to let people make their own decisions. Really.”

That’s all well and good, but it kind of boils down to this: reality shows like Love is Blind probably want to cast some a**holes, just to keep things interesting. The audience doesn’t just want someone to root for, they want someone to root against. It wouldn’t be American reality television if there weren’t a few participants stirring the pot!

[Image via Netflix/YouTube]