After 12 seasons of drama, the pressure to constantly be serving tea is causing the show to boil over entirely.
This week on Married at First Sight Australia, a contestant walked out after experiencing what they described as “the lowest of the lowest of the low”. If you’ve been watching, you’d know this descriptor could be applied to all number of circumstances, be it Ryan boasting to the other grooms about how Jacqui “gives good head”, Eliot sulking because he wanted a bride 10 years younger, or Jake saying “I’m not racist, but I like Caucasian people mostly”.
All these lowest of lows, and yet none of them were being referenced here. Instead, this was a quote from 30-year-old man Adrian after he threw a huge sooky lala because he wasn’t included in a MAFS promo shoot. Taking his ring off and demanding that producers put him in the promo or he would walk, it was yet another example of my working thesis for this extremely odd, possibly shark-jumping season: the inmates are now running the asylum.
Since its revamp in 2017, Married at First Sight Australia has long ceased being a social experiment about wide-eyed strangers looking for love, and what’s emerged is something closer to a hybrid of professional wrestling and soap opera. “It went up to four nights a week,” expert John Aiken explained on The Spinoff last year. “We brought in more couples, we brought in dinner parties and commitment ceremonies, and then we sat back to see what happened.”
What happened, of course, was a ratings smash. To stick with pro wrestling terms, the dinner parties soon became the A-show, where heroes and villains would face off, bit part players would step from the shadows into the spotlight, and red wine splattered like fake blood. But beneath the theatrics, the show always held onto its compelling human stories – the complexity of the Tin Man, the class warfare of Domenica vs Olivia, the total absurdity of Collins.
This season, that balance feels off – and not just because the cast arrived stacked with loud and proud misogynists. I’ll begin with the more minor production gripe that not one, but two of the couples matched had already dated each other in the past. As Rhi and Jeff arrived at the altar with a grin of recognition and a sighed “hi Rhi”, “hi Jeff”, the “total stranger” concept was shattered instantly. What is this, New Zealand?! Australia has 26 million people!
What didn’t even make it to TV was the fact that two MORE contestants had slept together in the past, news which emerged from one of the dozens of splashy MAFS gossip accounts that are threatening to supersede the show in both scoops and drama. This season even opened with a montage of frenzied TikToks and Reels about the “global sensation” of MAFS AU. You have to wonder, is the pressure to serve “tea” causing the show to boil over entirely?
Because while the best of MAFS is the slow unravelling of facades and the building of tension and moments of release between personalities, the drama this season has been explosive and relentless from the start, and we’ve seen producers openly struggle to get anyone to play ball. Multiple people have left outside of the commitment ceremonies which, although a totally fake device, is still important in wrapping up storylines and serving narrative justice.
Sometimes, the drama has been so much that it has teetered on incomprehensible. Jacqui and Ryan, some of the most perplexing characters ever put on television, hate each other’s guts one day and are welling up about their future children the next. Adrian and Sierah are clearly having an affair, complete with footsies at the dinner party, and yet the focus remains entirely on promo-gate. Morena’s wrath scares me so much I don’t even want to mention it.
The group dynamic is also very strange, with too many of the contestants openly revelling in the drama (see: Billy’s wide-eyed reactions and heckles) and nobody stepping up to be the Lucinda Light-type moral compass. I’m loath to bring it up again, but when Ryan told the grooms that “Jacqui gives good head”, the group became fixated on whether or not it was true, rather than the fact he grossly shared such an intimate detail at all. Priorities, people!
Thankfully, Alessandra got to dunk on Ryan for that, but the experts have been extremely lacklustre in their roles this season. John Aiken, famous for coming off the top ropes with harsh truths, mostly seems to be slumped over in the corner of the expert couch like an abandoned ventriloquist dummy. Instead of tackling the rampant emotional abuse and gaslighting, they all just seem totally knackered and holding their heads in their hands like the rest of us.
Which brings me to my final gripe: why on god’s greenest Sydney apartment astroturfed earth did they bring back Eliot and Lauren to get remarried? Bringing back cast members breaks the fabric of the universe, but particularly when you give another shot to the tradwife and the guy who wants a wife with no aspirations apart from “gym”. If anyone deserved it, it was Katie – although it would be no surprise if she never wants to go near MAFS again.
The bleakest part of all of this is that if reality television holds up a mirror, what’s being reflected in MAFS scans with our reality. We’ve got the collapsing hierarchies, eroding trust in authority, conflict and scandal outweighing nuance and facts, and the worst men you’ve ever seen saying the craziest shit you’ve ever heard with little to no repercussions. We used to watch MAFS to try and escape the real world, but now it’s all in there, screaming right back at us.
And that, to borrow a phrase from Adrian, might truly be the lowest, of the lowest, of the low.
