MAFS meets polyamory: The messy Netflix show all about blowing up relationships

Drama, narcissism and love triangles are all the ingredients you need for delectable reality TV. And they’re served up on a silver platter in Netflix’s The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, a kind of turbocharged version of Married at First Sight.

With The Ultimatum, the creative team behind Love Is Blind – where contestants speed date while separated by a wall and propose before seeing each other – has upped the ante. Host Nick Lachey prefaces the show by reminding us that “psychologists say it’s not healthy to give ultimatums,” before imploding six relationships under the guise of a “social experiment”.

The Ultimatum’s Madlyn and Randall, who started the show with other partners, kiss in episode five of the reality series.Credit: Netflix

The premise of the show is both absurd and simple. Six young and attractive long-term couples are recruited because they can’t agree on whether to get married. After speed dating each other, primarily while in swimwear, each participant selects a new partner for a three-week trial marriage. After that new relationship, they revert to their original coupling for three weeks. Then it’s decision time: get hitched or break up publicly.

The show is unbridled chaos, putting long-term monogamy on a pedestal while encouraging non-monogamous behaviour to stir drama. It’s a mean-spirited premise designed to evoke jealousy.

It’s clear the show is geared towards sex and temptation rather than actually trying to salvage relationships. If you took a sip of wine every time the camera zooms in on the cast’s bits you’d need your stomach pumped.

While non-monogamy is a viable option for many people, in The Ultimatum it’s used as little more than a tool to toy with people’s insecurities. The show is less interesting than exploring whether long-term, monogamous relationships are healthy and desirable and more about just creating drama, pouring gasoline and lighting the match.

Nate and Lauren came to the show with irreconcilable differences... but quickly got engaged anyway.Credit: Jody Domingue/Netflix

The ultimatum-givers sign up for the show believing their partners will explore their options and come crawling back. But the marriage-or-bust threat breeds resentment, so the cast members make the most of their hall pass. Yay, a new partner who is hot, validates me, and doesn’t whinge about marriage. The camera pans from the successful speeds dates over to seething partners – it’s brutal.

The show capitalises on a core tenet of monogamy: being chosen. The coupling ceremony is a chaotic display of fear and desperation. Thirty-year-old Nate gave his partner Lauren the ultimatum because he wants children, and she’s on the fence. Panic washes over his face after no one chooses him, whispering “I’m going to pick you” to a cast member. In a move of desperation he proposes to his original partner, Lauren, despite their differences. It’s jarring to watch Lauren happily accept the proposal after she’d openly resented his forcefulness until that point.

The trial marriages begin in apartments riddled with cameras. In Big Brother style they all get handsy under the bedsheets. Is this cheating? It’s hard to tell. In ethical non-monogamy there are clear boundaries set. It’s the perpetual grey area behaviour and lack of plot structure which makes the show so unhinged.

The Ultimatum, like most popular reality dating shows, revolves around alcohol. Twenty-four-year-old Madlyn drunkenly tells the other girls her new partner Randall ticks all her boxes, and they’ve fooled around, in front of his long-term girlfriend Shanique. Yikes.

The show could have served as an intriguing look at non-monogamous relationships but instead is just designed to create drama.Credit: Netflix

When the original couples move in together the consequences of their actions flare up. It’s impossible to find a couple or a person to root for. Mainly because they’re so young and clearly not ready for marriage. Just when you start to feel some sympathy for a person they wave a flaming red flag.

Another participant, 23-year-old April, finds a video of a fellow cast member twerking on her partner’s phone and accuses him of cheating – seemingly forgetting what show they’re on. After Madlyn debases her partner Colby for the entire show, she angrily confronts him about his text messages with a girl he met at a club. He insists his show partner wasn’t giving him an authentic experience of an “open relationship” so he needed to “outsource”.

The couples are destined to fail because the format encourages it. They use the excuse “we were on a break” as a blanket statement for any toxic behaviour. At least with Married at First Sight the cast members start with a clean slate to find love. With The Ultimatum, monogamous relationships are already established and are muddied by contrived drama.

The show doesn’t unpack the toxic behaviour displayed but instead encourages the couples to get married regardless of their incompatibility. Because monogamy is the goal, people!

It feels like a messy, trashy reversion to the original intention of reality TV: embarrassing cast members with cruel premises. It could have been an opportunity to represent non-monogamy with some nuance, but instead it stigmatises it.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its shortfalls, it’s extremely popular and has been renewed for another season.Season two of The Ultimatum will feature an all-queer cast, guaranteeing even more possible relationship permutations and messiness.

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