Married At First Sight hits desperate new nude low
WARNING: Graphic. Families copped more than they bargained for at 8pm on telly last night — with Channel 9 now apparently competing with OnlyFans.
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In a desperate attempt to battle the full-frontal nudity and X-rated scenes found on edgy streaming shows, Channel 9 is nudging the needle with Married At First Sight’s annual Sex Week and — surprise! — you can practically hear the bring-bring-bringing telephone in the network’s complaints department.
Monday’s episode had all the gritty elements of a scripted HBO drama starring Nicole Kidman: love, betrayal … and gratuitous nudity.
There was even a scene that involved a near-naked wife seductively licking melted Cadbury Dairy Milk off her husband’s hairy nipple before a different wife was sexually rejected while wearing a G-string.
Um, sorry, but was this masterpiece written by David E. Kelley? It’s truly evocative storytelling from the MAFS producers.
As part of Sex Week (or Intimacy Week, as it’s more formally known), the wives purchased racy lingerie and proceeded to play out their fantasies with their husbands. We the viewers were taken along for the experience. What a treat!
We got to watch … well … whatever is going on here:
MORE:Gross reality of MAFS revealed
Needless to say, that bloke on the Gold Coast who keeps complaining about G-string bikinis probably had a conniption when he saw these scenes blasted into his living room at 8pm on a weeknight.
With free-to-air TV viewership declining, programmers are hastily trying to win us back the only way they know how: sex and candy.
We’re sure Cadbury is thrilled with the integrated advertising of the chocolate nipple.
Broadcasters are clearly in a panic about competing with all the prestige programming we’ve become addicted to on streaming platforms – a programming Wild West that’s not bound by the strict free-to-air rules when it comes to graphic themes.
There’s a reason we’re obsessed with The White Lotus and Euphoria and And Just Like That. It’s visually cinematic storytelling punctuated with full-frontal sex scenes that belong on OnlyFans. We’ve now come to expect this level of quality from everything we watch.
It’s a winning equation. And the Married At First Sight producers are working overtime to serve it up to us – with their sweeping drone camera shots over Sydney Harbour and, now, awkward nudity.
Before last night’s sexcapades, Channel 9 was already in the headlines for its new scripted series Madam, starring Rachel Griffiths as an American woman who moves to New Zealand to open an ethical feminist brothel. One pearl-clutching viewer wrote in to 2GB breakfast radio host Ben Fordham to express concern.
“It just goes to show the decline in our society to have this filth on at 9pm at night or even at all,” they wrote.
“Even if this is legally allowed to be aired — so what? Does anybody proof watch these shows?”
The outraged viewer suggested Channel 9 is trying to corrupt our children and make our elderly die of shock.
“You should be sued by our society for forcing images on our children, elderly and people of any age that innocently think they are safe to turn the channel over and then be hit with those images that will forever be scarred in their mind,” they wrote.
If this is the reaction to a Rachel Griffiths drama, imagine how this viewer is going to respond to the freakshows on MAFS with their G-strings and chocolate nipples.
Fordham should give that listener a welfare call in the morning to make sure he’s still breathing and isn’t passed out in his Amart recliner.
Thanks to streaming, we’ve spent the last few years living through a weiner renaissance, with full-frontal penises popping up on every other scripted series. Weiners have become the pénis de résistance of TV.
And we hope to hell the Married At First Sight producers don’t follow this trend next year.
Facebook: @hellojamesweir
Originally published as Married At First Sight hits desperate new nude low
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