"Game Show" Uses Legal Marriage as Cheap Gimmick
Television producers care so little about marriage that they have been using it as a cheap gimmick to drum up ratings and money.
It started in 2014, when producers in Denmark launched a new reality show that centered around a man and a woman meeting on air for the first time ever and then agreeing to marry each other.
Called “Married at First Sight,” the show wound up being duplicated by other Western countries, including the United States, Australia, Italy and Germany.
Its purpose was to be a “ground-breaking social experiment” that would help determine “whether science is better than we are at determining our ideal partner,” according to The U.K. Daily Telegraph.
The idea basically was to pit the matchmaking skills of “psychologists, anthropologists and a vicar” against, you know, common sense.
Novel and interesting, right?
Except that it now grows more clear by the day that the show was and still remains nothing but a cheap gimmick designed to gin up ratings.
Here’s how former contestant Simone Lee Brennan described the experience of being on the Australian version of the show in a blog post she published last month, as reported by Cosmopolitan magazine: “f***ed.”
“My faith in the ‘match-making’ process dwindled away somewhat when my TV husband shared with me immediately post-wedding ceremony that he hadn’t dated for years and never actually applied for the experiment,” she reportedly wrote.
“So, when did I know the match-makers had really failed at their one job? It became clear as day when my TV husband took great pleasure in asking the sound crew, camera crew, producers and what-have-you about potential front-of-house sports presenting gigs.”
Here’s the good news, as noted by the Telegraph: “Matched couples are offered a get out of jail card – ie a divorce – after six weeks if things don’t work out.”
But here’s the bad news: Even if both partners mutually agree to calling it off, the producers of the show will purposefully make it seem as if only one partner wanted to end it. Why? For ratings, of course.
In the case of Australian contestant Susan Rawlings, who was briefly married to a cowboy identified only as Sean, the producers had the two read final vows to each other before going their own ways, but then twisted their footage to make Rawlings look like the bad guy.
“The editing team completely twisted it all around so that it looks like Sean went first and said that he wants to stay with me and ride off into the sunset together,” she told The Sunday Times in an interview last year.
They accomplished this by reportedly editing out Sean’s final line in which he admitted he too didn’t want to continue their sham marriage.
Everything about this show is a sham, folks, save for one thing: the producers’ greed. That, sadly, is all too real.
To be fair, some marriages from the show have lasted, but most haven’t — and the reason should be obvious: Love isn’t rocket science, literally, and a successful marriage needs a solid foundation instead of being built upon ratings and exploitation.
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