Lifetime’s “Married at First Sight” (MAFS) aired its seventeenth season in 2024, averaging 2.58 million viewers per weekly episode. In this paper, we ask, how does MAFS reflect and intervene in contemporary marriage politics, particularly regarding race, gender, class, and sexuality in the U.S.? To answer this question, we draw on scholarship about marriage as a political institution, and on reality TV as a window into contemporary socio-economic issues. Using interpretive, feminist methods of analysis, we find that MAFS reflects and intervenes in contemporary marriage politics by offering viewers a very traditional and exclusionary version of the institution at a time when it and everything else (reproductive rights and same-sex marriages, to name just two examples) is in flux. However, even as it attempts to offer a “balm” to all of this upheaval, in practice, the show’s “experimental results” offer something more complex, which both reflects the contemporary realities of marriage and attracts viewers.

Abstract

: Lifetime’s “Married at First Sight” (MAFS) aired its seventeenth season in 2024, averaging 2.58 million viewers per weekly episode. In this paper, we ask, how does MAFS reflect and intervene in contemporary marriage politics, particularly regarding race, gender, class, and sexuality in the U.S.? To answer this question, we draw on scholarship about marriage as a political institution, and on reality TV as a window into contemporary socio-economic issues. Using interpretive, feminist methods of analysis, we find that MAFS reflects and intervenes in contemporary marriage politics by offering viewers a very traditional and exclusionary version of the institution at a time when it and everything else (reproductive rights and same-sex marriages, to name just two examples) is in flux. However, even as it attempts to offer a “balm” to all of this upheaval, in practice, the show’s “experimental results” offer something more complex, which both reflects the contemporary realities of marriage and attracts viewers.