MAFS is a total slop devoid of any nutritional value. But what keeps people watching it?
MAFS is a total slop devoid of any nutritional value. But what keeps people watching it?
OPINION: Despite Married at First Sight not being a good show, Karl Puschmann can’t stop watching it. Here’s why.
To my great and eternal shame, I have been watching the latest season of Three’s Reality TV behemoth Married At First Sight (MAFS). Worse, I have been enjoying it.
Let me be clear; MAFS is not a good show. I can’t even call it good television. A guilty pleasure? No. Even that faint praise is going too far. It’s total slop devoid of any nutritional value. And yet I keep scoffing it down, night after night, like the gluttonous zombie the show quite correctly assumes I am.
A quick recap: MAFS is an Australian reality TV show that pairs a handful of strangers together and “marries” them off. Yes, it makes a mockery of the institution of marriage, down-valuing it and degrading it for light entertainment purposes, but as the show also makes a mockery of its viewers’ intelligence, that’s by the by.
The reality TV show pairs a handful of strangers together and “marries” them off. Photo / Warner Bros Discovery
Once the couples have all been married at first sight, the series then follows the bunch of minimally diverse newlyweds as they get to know each other, discover if they can tolerate their supposedly eternal partner and maybe - just maybe - even fall in love and live happily ever after (within the constraints of its two-month production timeframe).
The show laughably takes a highfalutin’ view of its relationship voyeurism by constantly referring to its manufactured match-making as “an experiment”. Believe me, there is zero scientific value to this “experiment”. Unless of course, the predictable conclusions of such an experiment, like looks can be deceiving, it takes time to get to know someone and that in Western society marrying a total stranger is a bad idea, completely blow your mind.
As a viewing experience, MAFS grinds your critical faculties to mush over each episode’s elongated 90-minute running time. By design, the show is mind-numbingly monotonous, endlessly repeating scenes you’ve just watched and constantly teasing scenes you’re just about to watch. If you removed all the redundancy from each episode, I reckon you could trim a cool half-hour at least.
MAFS has plenty of straight-to-camera bitching sessions and copious references to buses and being thrown under them. Photo / Warner Bros Discovery
Squeezed between the dusty old and the juicy new is the actual show. It has all the expected reality trappings of challenges for the couples to do, plenty of straight-to-camera bitching sessions and copious references to buses and being thrown under them. This stuff makes up the first couple of episodes of the week, with the final two consisting of a dinner party where everyone generally has a go at one another and their relationships and then an episode where the couples talk to MAFS‘ three relationship experts, who offer counsel before giving each person the option to stay and fight for love - or the continued fame of being on TV four nights a week - or go and return to life in obscurity.
The show’s drama is injected organically as relationships are often hard work when you’ve selected them yourself, let alone had one forced upon you. So as the show ploughs on, you see those electric sparks fizzle out between a couple, only to be replaced by tetchy annoyance and, ultimately, the ick. You see tempers flare and hearts broken. You see dreams crash into reality. You see how fickle humans are but also how ugly and unreasonable we all can be.
“I don’t know what I did wrong,” one poor sap wept as his wife of a few weeks announced she wanted to leave him at once. Anyone watching the show could have given him a shopping list of his mistakes and failings as a husband, loving partner and reasonable person.
But natural circumstances can only get you so far. Some people, no matter how much the show’s writers try to engineer compromising situations, actually do become lovey-dovey. This is not entertaining in the least.
The show’s producers are well aware of this and are not above mischievously spicing events up. Couples will sometimes find themselves “privy to information” of other’s discretions with no further explanation given. This will come out in the most spectacular and watchable way possible.
This is the good stuff of the show. This is how it hooks you for six hours a week. Because at its cold, dark heart, MAFS is an awful show for awful people.
It manipulates events and then manipulates how it represents those events - keep an eye on how food disappears and reappears from people’s plates during a tense or aggro exchange - to eke maximum drama out of real people’s actual feelings. It drip-feeds its dopamine hits by constantly dangling a fiery outburst or salacious accusation in front of you. It indulges humanity’s worst instincts and creates a safe space for your most gossipy and judgemental inclinations. It claims to be about true love but devotes the majority of its time to arguments, break-ups, falling-outs and deceit and deceptions.
MAFS final two episodes screen next week. I can’t wait.
