Love to See It with Emma and Claire

A cast of non-celebrity American players feature on this season of “The Traitors: New Blood” – an unusually “Harry Potter”-inflected season, especially considering how radioactive J.K. Rowling’s brand has become. (Why, exactly, are the Weasley twins here?) The cast is packed with standout personalities – a funeral director, a dog trainer, a mulleted executive, a 23-year-old, a baseball scout, a lawyer posing as a basketball coach – though some of these newly minted reality stars have done more strategic preparation than others. The first two episodes feature some classic “Traitors” blunders, including one that cruelly ended a blossoming showmance. Is “The Traitors” a dating show? Sadly, not at the moment.

Season 5 of “SLOMW” ends abruptly, after an on-camera revelation that Dakota’s friend has called CPS to report Taylor. But it’s not entirely out of the blue. The last two episodes contain ample signs that Taylor and Dakota’s toxic pattern is escalating dangerously. Meanwhile, Jen is trying to get her “pink back” by becoming a musician and returning to the Mormon fold, Jessi and Jordan throw a housewarming brunch that becomes a de facto divorce brunch, and Mayci and Mikayla have reached their wits’ end with the Taylor-Dakota situation. Annemarie Navar-Gill joins again to finish our discussion of this truncated season – and the path ahead for Taylor and the show, which has chosen to keep her on the cast.

Back in March, when Taylor Frankie Paul’s season of “The Bachelorette” was yanked just days before premiering, cameras were rolling for season five of her original reality show: “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” Production was ultimately paused, but season five wasn’t canceled – and all five episodes of the abbreviated season dropped last week. Annemarie Navar-Gill (the cohost of Bachelor in Retrospect) joined for a discussion of episodes 1-3, including a conversation about why this season aired to begin with, whether that was the right decision, and what it means for “The Bachelor” franchise that this season includes so many spoilers – and so much post-show drama that punctures the franchise’s fantasy brand.

By the second half of “Love Is Blind” UK, all is not well! Our crop of six robust couples has begun to dwindle, thanks to motivational speaker Ryan’s energetic hangovers and Jordan’s failure to find the spark. Ciara pushes Ajay’s boundaries just a bit too far, in the midst of her self-admitted quest to find the outer limits of his patience. And Jack pushes the limits of his ability to trek across London in shower sliders. Will any of these couples say “I do”? And, more importantly, what will they have to say about each other by the reunion? We finally have the answers by the end of this recap, and for once, those answers were pretty satisfying. Except for how Jack’s Find My Friends got turned off – that’s a question to which we may never get a straight answer.

The pods are open, to be fair! Claire and Leigh are finally catching up on “Love Is Blind” UK season 3, and it is a rollicking good time. We have a resident jovial love-bombing lad and a resident soft-life pink-pill girlie, plus an English MAHA type who only eats eggs produced by chickens who listen to “frequency music.” Despite this, and some classic love triangles, it feels like love really is brewing in the pods. In this episode, we talk about great sexpectations, great financial expectations, pot-stirrers, plaid Speedos, jacket potatoes with tuna, and ecstatic dancing.