I hadn’t planned to write about this, but life has a strange way of forcing your hand. After a particularly poisonous curry – honestly, I think my local takeaway has ditched frying pans in favour of cooking straight from the toilet – I found myself stranded on the couch unable to move. Drenched in sweat and shaking, I was too lethargic to reach for the remote, so a recent episode of Channel Nine’s flagship televised abattoir, Married at First Sight Australia vomited its way onto my screen. I intended to watch for five minutes, solely to mock a cast of chemically altered morons destroying their dignity in public. Instead, I was sucked into an abyss of misery.

For those of you who are employed or blessed with an IQ of over 75, MAFS Australia is less a dating show and more a Sadean torture chamber funded by a television network. It falls under that squalid descriptor: reality TV – or as one British judge famously put it when diagnosing the medium’s moral decay, ‘a human form of bear baiting’ masquerading as entertainment. Today, MAFS Australia has simply upgraded the arena, trading the screaming matches of daytime talk shows for the theatre of the modern marriage. It is consistently the most-watched program in the country. Millions of Australians tune in to watch this crap every week. We comfort ourselves by treating it as a guilty pleasure – a bit of harmless, highly edited trash to mock over a microwave meal before drinking yourself into a stupor, crying, wishing you’d made better life choices.

Except it’s not harmless anymore. Recently, the façade of MAFS Australia has completely collapsed, resulting in a massive investigation by SafeWork NSW following complaints from former cast members detailing extreme corporate manipulation and psychological abuse. Despite claims of robust vetting, production failed to catch that Timothy Smith had previously served 12 months for drug trafficking, while 2026 contestant Chris Nield slipped through with a record for assault. Whistle-blowers described an environment where contestants are isolated, exits physically blocked by crew, and emotional frailties are mined for content. An official report provided to NSW Minister Sophie Cotsis described these behind-the-scenes allegations as ‘potentially serious psychosocial hazards’. Turns out, when you turn human suffering into prime-time entertainment, it doesn’t just break hearts, it ruins people’s lives. Imagine my shock

To give this ersatz matrimony a sulphurous whiff of respectability, the bacchanalia is overseen by a panel of experts. Though ‘experts’ is a generous term in the context of this show. Credentialled middle-aged divorcees with pointless degrees act as little more than pimps, using pseudo-scientific nonsense to mask what is essentially a highly staged meat market.

The actual matchmaking process possesses all the subtlety and nuance of a hyperactive five-year-old violently smashing a G.I. Joe and Barbie together and demanding they hook up. After a few seasons, the UK version even ditched the legally binding ceremonies – cos who needs the tedious admin of actual marriage when you can watch two strangers trauma-bonded on a sofa, potentially going at it like rabbits at a chem-sex party?

This is where the cultural theorist Mark Fisher enters. Fisher wrote extensively about capitalist realism – the idea that market logic has so thoroughly colonised our minds that it has hollowed out our most sacred, private desires and assigned them a commercial key performance indicator. MAFS is the ultimate manifestation of this neoliberal hellscape. In the eyes of the producers, the human body is no longer a temple; it is a content-generating asset.

The show is fundamentally locked in an arms race – or should that be open-legs race? – with OnlyFans, the prime driver of sexual neoliberalism where intimacy is gamified, monetised, and stripped of its humanity. To compete in this highly sexualised, hyper-commodified market, MAFS must treat sex as a required return on investment. The result? Mainstream television has become just as transactional and commodified as the darkest recesses of the internet. The only difference is that MAFS labours under the misguided assumption that it’s about love.

True intimacy and trust are, by definition, slow and fiercely private. But television cannot wait for the natural thaw of human connection; it demands instant gratification forced onto screens to appease an audience programmed for slop. The show takes the sacred vulnerability of sex and turns it into a performance review. Its weekly ‘Commitment Ceremonies’ act as a corporate review board where contestants are publicly grilled by the experts on why they haven’t had sex yet – as if failing to perform like an on-demand porn star is a breach of contract rather than a basic exercise of human consent.

Of course, the biggest irony of this entire voyeuristic exercise is that it doesn’t even work. Out of 118 couples mismatched by the experts across the first 12 seasons of MAFS Australia, only six original couples have stayed together. The franchise boasts a shocking failure rate of roughly 95 per cent. But then, a 95-per-cent divorce rate isn’t a failure to the network – it’s a feature. A stable, healthy marriage makes for terrible television. The market doesn’t want love. No, it wants the spectacle – a highly monetised attention-grabbing fallout of love’s collapse.

Who would’ve thought that treating consent as a product would cause the system to break down? In the UK, the show ground to a halt when Channel 4 was forced to yank MAFS UK from its platforms following a damning BBC Panorama investigation, which detailed horrific allegations of sexual assault and rape by on-screen husbands during filming. Former contestants exposed the unhealthy, relentless focus by producers on pushing contestants into bed. This is what happens when you turn intimacy into a spectator sport.

In the end, Married at First Sight isn’t just trash TV – it’s a mirror held up to a culture that’s auctioned off its most private longings for ratings and ad revenue.

It has debased the concept of marriage, just as Mark Fisher warned us: love is diced, packaged, and fed through a prime-time meat grinder for mass consumption. We watch, we laugh, we take the piss out of it, but we’re all complicit – paying for the privilege to witness the slow-motion car crash of other people’s lives.