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After so many years and such incontrovertible proof that the experiment never works, you have to assume that Married at First Sight now attracts a very specific type of applicant. Someone happy to put short-term notoriety over long-term emotional peace, maybe, or someone who would gladly become an object of scorn and ridicule if it meant people noticed them.
On the most recent episode of Married at First Sight Australia, this nightmarish mishmash of problematic personalities finally boiled over. A contestant named Brook Crompton, who had previously left the show, returned for a surprise appearance at a dinner party, with the apparent intention of bullying everyone else as unpleasantly as possible. Crompton tore a strip through the other guests, spewing arbitrary hatred at all the other brides. The whole thing was so hard to watch that Crompton ended up grovelling on Instagram that: “This behaviour is not a reflection of who I am at my core and I hope that Australia will one day see this.”
Viewer reaction to Brook’s behaviour was immediate, with some questioning why the episode was even aired at all. And this wouldn’t have been without precedent, since in the US an entire season of The Bachelorette was pulled at the last minute following footage of the titular bachelorette violently attacking her partner.
But the Married at First Sight episode did air, and as such it joins the ranks of reality show moments that probably should never have seen the light of day. Here are its bedfellows.
Celebrity Big Brother, 2007
Perhaps the ugliest moment in all of reality television came when a group of Big Brother housemates, led by Jade Goody, turned on Indian actor Shilpa Shetty and unleashed a volley of racial abuse at her, commenting on her accent and behaviour as well as referring to her as ‘“Shilpa Poppadom”’ and telling her to “fuck off home”. As well as being an unbelievably grotesque thing to witness, the incident was so toxic that many sponsors ended up leaving Celebrity Big Brother.
Big Brother, 2004
But this was not the only example of abhorrent behaviour on Big Brother. Three years previously saw the incident that came to be known as “fight night”, where many of the housemates – egged on by producers keen not to repeat the dullness of the previous series – ended up involved in a violent confrontation. Tables were flipped. Faces were slapped. And then housemates Emma and Victor got into a fight so alarming that the video feed was cut and the show had to dispatch security guards to the house. Things got so distressing that, for the first time, viewers called police to the Big Brother house. Awful.
Love Island, 2016
Another show that has sometimes struggled to find the line that separates “entertaining” and “stomach-churning” is Love Island. Nowhere was this more evident than the second series of its 2010s incarnation, the centrepiece of which was a screaming fight between Malia and Kady over some spilled wine. Resembling CCTV footage from outside a nightclub at 3am, the fight got uglier and uglier until security entered the villa and, eventually, Malia was ejected.
Ex on the Beach, 2014
As with Married at First Sight, once people knew the central gimmick of Ex on the Beach – that some fun and flirty singletons have their holiday ruined by the sudden appearance of former flames – only idiots and attention-seekers applied. But in the first episode of the first season, the twist came as a complete surprise to contestants, who reacted with such emotional intensity that it was like witnessing several breakdowns at once. Maybe the whole series should have been pulled. Instead, it ran for a decade.
America’s Next Top Model, 2003-2018
And there’s this show, which has become hard to watch in retrospect thanks to this year’s Netflix documentary Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. In retrospect, the whole thing was a nightmare of instantly cancellable behaviour. Models were blacked up, or actually forced to have their teeth pulled out, or criticised for the colour of their skin. The most uncomfortable moment, looking back, was when a Black model was forced to kiss a model who declared that he didn’t like Black girls, then found herself eliminated for not verbalising her discomfort eloquently enough. How on earth did this constitute popular entertainment?
