How Married At First Sight got us all hooked

Most analysis of Married At First Sight says it’s in the ‘so bad it’s good category’ ... but there’s more to it than that.

Davina 'married' Ryan on Married at First Sight (left) ... but soon found herself in the arms of another woman's husband, Dean.

This year I have completed two notable culture achievements. The first is to read (and finish) a Patrick White novel; the second was to watch the finale of Married At First Sight.

Given that this is a newspaper more used to publishing think pieces from contributors such as former High Court justice Dyson Heydon, as we did this week, some context might be required.

Married at First Sight is a reality program on the Nine Network which features 11 couples, matched by experts, who agree to marry each other the first time they meet (they don’t really marry, due to legal restrictions). The couples then spend their wedding night together, go on a honeymoon and live together for a month before deciding whether to continue the relationship. During this time they meet parents and friends, go on contrived dates and row a lot. Every so often the couples meet en masse for a highly charged group dinner. Rather than a progressive dinner, this on occasions turns into a partner swapping dinner.

The program has been a ratings smash and an astonishing generator of news and social media headlines. A sample: MAFS Dean’s explicit texts finally revealed; MAFS — Davina Rankin returns for final dinner to cause explosive drama; MAFS’ Troy and Carly break silence on ‘virgin’ rumours; Five predictions for WTF is going down on the MAFS finale and my personal favourite: Airport worker claims MAFS caused flight delays.

Okay, so it’s not The Twyborn Affair. But while sales of novels by our only Nobel prize for Literature winner are lucky to scrape into the thousands each year, last night the finale MAFS was watched by 1.7 million Australians in the five biggest capital cities alone. For a non-sporting event, this is likely to be the most popular thing on the box all year.

Of more interest is who is watching. I know that I am not alone in being a highly intelligent adult snared by the addictive nature of this series.

On ABC Radio Sydney this morning, listener after listener lined up to confess that this was a program that they couldn’t do without. The insatiable hunger for this program among all types is part of a broader cultural craze sweeping over us.

Ashley Irvin and Troy Delmege on Married At First Sight. Photo: Channel 9

At the high-end ABC Andrew Olle journalism lecture last year, I sat with a table of senior female journalists and a key topic of conversation was not the address by New York Times managing editor Joseph Kahn, but what was happening on The Bachelorette, Network Ten’s dating reality franchise.

As I sit and type this I learn that even this paper’s managing editor, who will now probably deny me a pay rise, is a MAFS fan.

While The Bachelorette and similar programs hearken back to romantic comedies such as When Harry Meet Sally, MAFS isn’t really about the marriage, in the best tradition of Kramer versus Kramer, it is about the divorce, in this case a slow motion car crash in treacle breakup over eight TV weeks. Few couples, if any, ever make it.

Most analysis of the program’s appeal put it squarely in the “so bad it’s good category”, but there must be more to it than that.

It is really a modern day morality play in the best tradition of The Canterbury Tales, where the main characters are attributed abstract qualities and lessons about good conduct (and bad) are presented to the audience.

But it this case it’s not overdoing it on the mead, failing to uphold your husband’s public honour and ignoring the deportment books, but rather micro-cheating, failing to uphold your husband’s public honour and sexting.

I don’t know how closely we can compare MAFS’s Davina to the Wife of Bath, beyond the fact that they both exhibit unconventional views about marriage. But there is no doubt that if he were alive today Chaucer himself would be as hooked on MAFS as the rest of us.