The New Season Of ‘Married At First Sight’ Could Feature Same-Sex Couples

Australia’s first season of Married At First Sight has come and gone, and we’ve all learned some very valuable lessons. Or maybe just the one: a marriage born from mutual desperation, guided by pseudo-scientific “relationship experts”, and played out in front of the nation is just a terrible, god-awful idea.

Three of the four couples from the first season called it quits at their first opportunity out, one of the contestants has already married her former partner, and another is featuring on the latest season of The Farmer Wants A Wife.

But, after being insistently marketed as “a social experiment” rather than “a pretty shit reality TV show”, the most interesting aspects of the series have played out off-screen in broader public debate. With the aim of being deliberately “noisy” the show was launched the same week marriage equality was being debated (or more accurately, ignored) in the Australian Senate, which resulted in more than 20,000 people petitioning Channel Nine for its cancellation. Despite all this, the show enjoyed incredible commercial success and was renewed for a second season after just one episode.

Now, just a few days after the historic legalisation of same-sex marriage in the US and the resultant worldwide celebration, it’s been announced that the show is accepting applications for contestants seeking a same-sex relationship. It’s finally happened. Our proud gay and lesbian citizens have been granted full and equal rights (to humiliate themselves on tacky dating shows).

This was all announced this morning as a spokesperson for the show’s casting agency revealed the news to TV Tonight. “They have a discreet question under the Partner section that asks the gender of their preferred partner, male or female,” they said. “That gives them the option at least, to determine if they’ll make that statement in the show.”

And, as small or silly as this sounds, it’s actually pretty great. Gay couples have featured on Australian reality TV for some time now — Gavin Atkins and Warren Sonin were the first on The Block in 2003 — but they’ve remained largely absent from the ongoing deluge of shows which focus on relationships. Despite some attempts to skewer the format overseas, successful shows like The Farmer Wants A Wife and The Bachelor remain hardwired towards heterosexuality; last year the US host of the latter announced that a gay version of the show would never happen, and Funny or Die have even satirised the idea for its serious logistical faults.

Weirdly enough, Married At First Sight might just be one of the few formats that allows for such equal representation. As we discovered before the start of season one, the initial marriages aren’t legally binding so current legislation wouldn’t pose any obstacle to the majority of the show. And, if a same-sex couple did decide to legitimise their union at the end of the run it could conceivably continue the push for marriage equality on one of the highest-rating commercial series in the country.

Ideally, yes, it would be great if those kind of mainstream conversations could happen with regular, loving and committed same-sex couples who didn’t meet through some kind of exploitative relationship bingo. But unless every TV exec in the country spirals into an intense moral crisis that makes them repulsed by money in the nearby future, this is likely the best we’ll get.

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If you’d like to be in the next season of Married At First Sight, apply here. The show won’t feature any same-sex couples unless they get a sufficient number of applicants.

Feature image via Married At First Sight/Channel Nine.