Married at First Sight: ‘a recipe for disaster’?

Two women told the BBC’s “Panorama” that they were raped during the filming of show and a third alleged she was subjected to a non-consensual sex act. According to “Panorama”, Channel 4 was aware of some allegations before the investigative programme was broadcast.

‘The experiment has failed’

“The name of the show says it all,” said Colin Robertson in The Sun – “could there be a more guaranteed recipe for disaster”? Reality TV is “engaged in a race to the bottom” because “times are hard in telly land” and the genre is “often cheap to make”, offering a “route” to the “lucrative Gen Z and millennial market”.

But “balancing ethics and explosive TV will always be an impossible feat”, said Serena Smith on Dazed. Producers “can’t just let unhappy contestants walk away” from “Married at First Sight”, because they need to “produce a show – and a show packed with high-octane conflict”.

The recent allegations “prove that there’s just no way of making a reality TV show centred around dating that is both ethical and entertaining. God knows bosses have tried”. So “finally, it’s time to accept that the experiment has failed”.

The show is only “watchable” because it “breaks with modern romantic norms”, said Ella Dorn in The New Statesman, “but those norms exist for safety’s sake”. Instead, the format “both pressures people into unsuitable relationships and presents sex as a matter of course”. There was “no real way to restrict its harm to women”.

‘Psychological torment as entertainment’

But what does all this say about society? “By focusing on the undeniable sins of reality television”, there’s “a risk of missing the wider point”, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. “The chilling thing about these allegations” is that “reality TV stands accused of being too real by half”.

Hinsliff cites research from 2013 that found one in 10 women in Britain said they’d been forced into sex against their will. Half of female respondents to another survey had “woken up to find a male partner attempting to have sex with them in their sleep – a scenario described by one of the “Married at First Sight” women”.

We think we are “far more virtuous” than the ancient Romans who “flocked to the Colosseum to watch slaves and prisoners killed by starving animals”, said Mary Harrington on UnHerd. But, “at a moral level”, is “staging domestic abuse as primetime entertainment” any “less grotesque”?

The “Panorama” allegations “ought to prompt a deeper reckoning about the national predilection for staging low-grade psychological torment as entertainment”.