‘We’re the Britney Spears of TV’: Why the world loves Australia’s MAFS

In an interview with The New York Times this week, Promising Young Woman director Emerald Fennell revealed the comforting way she coped with nerves while waiting to see if she’d scored an Oscar nomination.

“I think I did what any sensible person would do: I watched about six hours of Married at First Sight Australia to take my mind off it,” Fennell said.

The surprise name-drop highlighted the extent to which our local reality TV series - which airs on Nine, the owner of this masthead - has become a global hit.

Emerald Fennell’s season six favourites, Cam and Jules.Credit: Nigel Wright

In the UK, where the Australian version’s sixth season (broadcast here in 2019 and featuring Ines and Sam) has been airing on Channel 4 during lockdown, viewers are raving. Fans on social media have praised its bonkers plot twists, while Grammy-winning singer Sam Smith described it as “incredible television”.

During its season broadcast on Channel 4 the show reached an average consolidated audience of 1.4 million viewers, and it was the top-ranked series on All 4, Channel 4’s on-demand service, every week during its run.

In the US, a country that is essentially reality TV ground zero (MTV’s The Real World more or less launched the genre in 1992), the show’s sixth season is currently averaging 93,000 viewers in the core 25-54 demographic for Lifetime, outperforming the network’s average unscripted encore audience by 9 per cent, and generating strong social media chatter from Americans around the show’s antics.

“I worked in London for 12 years and I’ve had probably 30 friends ring me going, ‘That bloody show of yours is amazing!’” says Adrian Swift, Nine’s head of content, production and development. “It’s extraordinary. I’m very proud it’s done so well.”

The reason for the world’s interest is simple. The Australian version, with its cheating scandals and wine-throwing confrontations, is a dramatically different beast to international versions still taking their cues from the show’s polite, documentary-based Danish origins.

A Nine spokesperson said MAFS consistently rated as Australia’s No. 1 non-news program, with an average of about 1.4 million viewers tuning in nationally during the live broadcast of the current season - its eighth - and as many as 500,000 viewers watching each episode on 9Now.

Swift says the local innovations, launched when Endemol Shine took over production on the series’ fourth season in 2017, were driven by Nine’s desire to have a “supersized” show that could take on Seven’s then ratings juggernaut My Kitchen Rules. Endemol’s changes, including increased intermingling between the show’s participants, struck reality TV gold.

“Look, things like affair storylines, we’ve never wanted those to happen particularly,” says Swift. “We’ve got an iron-clad rule: we don’t make anything happen on the show. But if you live by that rule, you have to live by its corollary which is, if something happens you can’t exorcise it.”

Perhaps because of its divisiveness, or criticism that it is exploiting participants for our collective entertainment, the show’s overseas success begs the question: can Australia get behind MAFS being its newest cultural export?

“I think it’s fantastic,” says Catharine Lumby, a media professor at the University of Sydney who has written extensively on reality television. “Reality shows, along with koalas and kangaroos, will be what Australians are known for! Drunken dinner parties that go terribly wrong!”

Professor Lumby says long-lingering “snobby” stereotypes about reality TV continue to misjudge the genre and treat its fans as “idiots who just sit there and suck up trash”. She says despite MAFS′ artificiality and bombast, it telescopes aspects of modern dating where apps like Tinder have made the process of finding a companion seem both overwhelming and random.

Popular couple Belinda and Patrick from Married at First Sight’s current Australian season.Credit: Nigel Wright

“This is the thing about reality TV - it’s not real in some ways, but in other ways it’s terribly real,” Professor Lumby says.

“I think there’s a mixture of people finding Married At First Sight funny and incredibly chaotic, but there’s also a genuine hunger out there from viewers to understand what does really make people compatible, and in that world it has some very real resonance and value.”

Swift says the response to MAFS Australia has been so strong in the UK that Channel 4 have called seeking advice about “turbocharging” their own version. But despite its now global popularity, he recognises not everyone’s on board with the show’s success.

“We are the Britney Spears of the television world: everyone loves to have a go, everyone likes to take a swipe. That’s all right, we don’t make the show because we want respect,” he says.

“I do get a bit annoyed when it’s dismissed as trash. A lot more work goes into making MAFS than does some of our finest shows upheld in other theatres. That upsets me a bit. But the reality is it’s still rating like steam and my validation comes at 9.01 every morning when we look at the numbers.”

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