Australia is obsessed with reality TV, and it’s become one of our key exports

If you were to ask the Married At First Sight experts what makes a good relationship, they’d say words such as loyalty, respect and commitment.

By these markers, the strongest relationship to emerge from 11 seasons of the dating reality show that airs on Nine (the owner of this masthead) is the one Australians have with it.

What did we all do on Valentine’s Day? Well, nearly 1.4 million of us chose to spend it with our most beloved, MAFS, according to VOZ figures, ratings agency OzTAM’s new measurement system.

The Valentine’s Day episode attracted a Total TV national audience of 1.37 million, which means close to 5 per cent of Australia’s population watched MAFS on Wednesday. That’s more people than will see Taylor Swift perform during her Era’s tour here. It’s more people than Benny Blanco has Instagram followers (and he gets Selena!).

So how did we form the most secure attachment of our lives with a show that makes us believe genital cupping is a reasonable form of intimacy? Your other experts – Osman Faruqi, Melanie Kembrey and Thomas Mitchell – are here to talk it out on the latest episode of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald’s pop culture podcast, The Drop.

Like all good therapists, they’ll tell you that what you thought was the problem was only a symptom of something much deeper. MAFS is just the topknot (IYKYK) on Australia’s obsession with reality television.

Sara and Tim are totally cooked, but our love affair with MAFS is enduring. Credit: Nine

Cast your mind back to Monday, January 29, when we were all sad the Australian Open was over.

Thankfully, the drama of the tennis was soon replaced by the drama of people singing, surviving and marrying (strangers!).

According to VOZ figures, MAFS scored a Total TV national audience of 1.252 million on Nine; 800,000 of us watched the rebooted Australian Idol on Seven and nearly 600,000 of us watched Australian Survivor: Titans v Rebels on 10. Don’t even make me do the math to tell you how many more people that is than Benny Blanco followers.

And the world seems to be as obsessed as we are with our particular take on the genre. Forget koalas as the friendly furry face of Australian culture; our local iterations of MAFS, Survivor and Love Island go gangbusters overseas.

Perhaps we even inspired Emerald Fennell’s grave love scene in Saltburn, as the Oscar-winner has said she’s a huge fan of MAFS.

But should we only be hearing wedding bells? What role, if any, could content quotas play in encouraging local broadcasters to diversify their output? How has reality TV’s influence seeped into other genres, including documentaries like ABC’s Nemesis? And should somebody please think of the children?

All this and more. Welcome to The Drop couch.

Married at First Sight is broadcast on Nine, owner of this masthead.