After 20 seasons, Married at First Sight has finally stopped pretending it’s a social experiment about love.
It’s embracing what it’s actually been for years: a reality show fueled by chaos, conflict, and irresistible mess.
And frankly, I’m perfectly content with that.
For pretty much its entire run, the US versions of this popular franchise have held fast to its own structure: a panel of “experts” sets up a handful of couples and allows us to follow them on this journey of marriage to a stranger.
Earlier seasons mostly kept these designated couples in their own little bubble, where they barely interacted with the others and only saw the matchmakers (with their shoddy track record) sparingly.
In the interim, they attempted to build a romance with a stranger, with virtually no tools at their disposal.
Cameras shoved in their faces? Oh, yeah, plenty of those. But legitimate guidance, mentorship, and support? Not so much.
Later seasons of Married at First Sight at least started putting the couples within orbit of each other. They framed it as giving them a support system.
The reality? It was a breeding ground for even more juicy drama, especially when you had things like partners ditching their match to have affairs with each other.
You know, perfect reality TV fodder.
The early days of the series liked to present itself as a genuine chance to find true love. It sold this romantic fantasy of “happily ever afters.”
We had seemingly earnest people who seemed genuine and felt that these matchmakers were their answer to it all.
MAFS dangled true love stories in our faces and stood fast in the notion that their intentions were pure and that the goal was genuinely to create long-lasting, happy, and healthy couples.
The problem is that they held onto this falsehood for years, long after it became clear that the goal was to produce edgy, controversial, messy, and dramatic television, not something authentic and long-lasting.
Casting mostly young, aesthetically pleasing individuals with more emotional baggage than the Griswolds on all of their vacations was a surefire sign that it wasn’t about “love.”
Essentially, when it became clear that contestants just wanted to be on television or get exposure, the show’s original premise went out the window.
And that’s before you even get into the franchise’s poor background-check controversies, which have resulted in everything from criminal records and restraining orders to secret babies.
The truth is that MAFS stopped being anything other than a messy reality show created to generate buzz well before the MAFS Season 18 group pact, which aimed to manipulate production (and the audience) as much as possible.
And other iterations of Married at First Sight across the world understood this.
MAFS UK stopped taking itself too seriously and jumped into its full potential as a messy reality show almost instantly.
And Married At First Sight Australia is reality TV gold.
As the most unhinged version of both this franchise and Love is Blind combined, Australia works because it doesn’t even pretend to be anything beyond what it is.
Messy, jaw-dropping, enraging, horrifying, and painfully addictive, MAFS Australia steps into its full, overproduced glory as if UnReal‘s Quinn King and Rachel Goldberg are orchestrating the hell out of it themselves.
Part of the unspoken contract between viewers and producers is knowing exactly what’s happening and happily going along for the ride anyway.
It’s bold, brash, and unapologetic, and ultimately, you begrudgingly respect it for what it is.
That’s why Married at First Sight finally abandoning the pretense we all knew they weren’t abiding by in the first place, in a relief.
Before that, the series was stuck in a strange purgatory, not simply leaning into its antics enough and straying too far from a genuine, wholesome premise.
Married at First Sight may have started as an experiment about love…
Maybe even a sociological experiment of sorts to explore how people function in relationships, navigate cultural changes, differences, and converging lifestyles, and prioritize connection over superficiality.
But the series has spent more time exploiting those things by pairing up people who are destined to clash and making the most explosive television of anything else.
Simply pairing up two people who lost a parent and love the color green is not what a strong partnership or marriage is built on.
Rather than convincing us of that, gaslighting viewers as well as some of its contestants, it’s much more respectable of them to lean into the bit.
In this day and age, you don’t cast a man who has never had a long-term relationship with a woman who barely has time to pencil in a relationship unless you want them to combust.
And you sure as hell don’t pair two people with polar opposite political leanings in the extreme or completely different stances on children or religion unless you’re looking for fireworks.
You pair them up for the drama and mess. Australia gets that. UK understands the assignment, and now, blessedly, MAFS gets it as well.
We already have polar opposite pairings, people who aren’t even close to compatible on paper, a woman who can’t tell us where she was on January 6, and even a guy who has been on damn near half a dozen reality shows already.
Pass me the popcorn, please!
Married at First Sight is adapting more of the group interactions, and let’s face it, that’s where the drama really sings in the first place.
It’s something the UK and Australian versions get, delivering us group therapy/couch sessions with the experts on one night and the absolutely scintillating, jaw-dropping dinner parties on another.
Married at First Sight is still trying to keep it “cute and classy,” as far as I know.
We aren’t getting those tell-tale dinner scenes that keep the internet abuzz as PEAK reality TV at its finest (or most deprived).
But the group couch sessions are sufficient because the tension between the group is almost as delicious as that between couples.
At this point, I’m not here for the love. Married at First Sight proved a long time ago; it’s not genuine in wanting to produce that.
No, I’m here for the mess.
And with these changes, and the series choosing to be as honest with itself as we are, maybe MAFS Season 20, which was deliberately designed for streaming unlike the others, will finally deliver.
It won’t be boring, and that’s all I can ask for.
Any Married at First Sight Fanatics out there? How are you feeling about this season and the changes so far?
You can stream Married at First Sight Thursdays on Peacock.
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