16,000 Marriage Equality Advocates Have Asked Channel Nine To Cancel ‘Married At First Sight’

It took Australian viewers two whole years and one mind-numbing scandal to start turning against The Bachelor, but Channel Nine are now embroiled in a much bigger outrage — and their new show hasn’t even started yet.

Announced last month, Married At First Sight is a reality show imported from Denmark, which partners four men and four women who have never met, then follows their first year of marriage — fearlessly investigating whether you can make two very sad people love each other.

Now, a Change.org petition has just clocked up more than 16,000 signatures from people demanding the network cancel it. “This television show is a disgrace,” it reads. “It is morally unsound and should not be aired on Australian television.”

While that kind of statement could probably be applied to most things in the TV dating smorgasbord of despair, the complaints with this show are specifically to do with its treatment of marriage. After all, wedding strangers for ratings is a weird thing to do at the best of times — but when you’re doing it in a country which still hasn’t legalised same-sex marriage because of the sanctity of the institution, it’s a little more problematic.

As if to illustrate this point, Channel Nine announced this show the same week the senate were set to debate David Leyonhjelm’s Freedom to Marry bill.

The petition was created around this time, calling for the network to cancel the show on this premise.

“It is appalling that we live in [a] country that will not support marriage equality but will support a television show such as this!” said the petition’s creator April Murphy.

And, over the course of the last month, many have echoed that sentiment.

Greens MP Sarah Hanson-Young shared the link on her Facebook page, attracting more than 24,000 Likes, and hundreds of commenters have expressed their own dissatisfaction upon signing:

“I can’t get married to someone I love in this country because I’m gay but people who have never met can get married and apparently we’re the ones who are ruining the sanctity of marriage, what a joke!” said one.

“This show makes a mockery of the institution of marriage when a significant portion of society are fighting for the right for their relationship to be recognised in the eyes of the law,” said another.

Others were less eloquent:

married at first sight looks fucked

— jo (@joannerivett) April 23, 2015

In the face of such widespread criticism, Channel Nine have responded to the petition, telling everyone the on-air marriages won’t be legally binding. “In order to comply with the Australian Marriage Act (1961) which requires one month and one day notification, a marriage in law was not conducted,” a spokesperson told news.com.au.

“Each participant embarked on a commitment ceremony with a wedding celebrant with all due intention to commit fully to this union for the duration of the experiment. At the end of the experiment they are given the option to continue with the relationship or go their separate ways.”

This is a marked difference from a previous version of the show in the US in which one of the three couples had to officially divorce.

And, while this is an important distinction, the decision to keep it under wraps until now could have been very deliberate. Nine’s programming director Andrew Backwell essentially just told AdNews the network wanted to cause a controversy.

“I think it’s one of the reasons we decided to pick it up. I think it’s a noisy show,” he said.

“It’s really important to have these types of shows because there’s so much choice around now, as there’s been such fragmentation of viewing … we’ve had all these streaming services which have popped up.”

FYI Netflix got our attention by delivering quality original content in a cheap and convenient way. But I guess this could work too.