MAFS After The Dinner Party review: more drama, more bitching and even less reality

With close to 2 million viewers each night, Nine’s Married at First Sight – or as everyone calls it, MAFS – is a ratings juggernaut. On some metrics, its audience is basically the same as the entire early evening free-to-air viewership, suggesting if you watch broadcast television in Australia, you watch MAFS.

Obviously this can’t be true – there must be some people (presumably rusted-on ABC viewers) watching television who don’t watch MAFS. But that opens the door to an even more depressing idea: if that’s the case, then there must be people who don’t watch free-to-air television at all – unless they tune in to watch MAFS.

MAFS is a reality show, or as everyone on it calls it, ‘the experiment’ – not that we’re ever told what this experiment is trying to prove – where a collection of extroverts and sad sacks ‘marry’ total strangers in the hope of finding love. Under the extremely dubious guidance of a trio of experts who seem constantly astonished when things go off the rails, these newlywed couples then spend weeks hanging around a hotel eating KFC because they’re a sponsor.

Expanding the experiment

They’re also given various challenges and chores to help showcase the products of other sponsors, and these occasionally provide an opportunity for the couples to express their feelings or lack thereof. If you’re in a couple and you watch this with your partner, there’s a good chance you’ll end up discussing your own relationship, even if it’s just ‘thank god I found you because if this is what is out there I’d rather die in a giant document shredder’.

To tap into the audience who have shifted entirely over to streaming presumably to avoid MAFS, Stan (which is owned by Nine) is now serving up Married At First Sight: After the Dinner Party, a behind-the-scenes look at the always-dramatic dinner party episodes.

In the lead up to the first episode of MAFS: ATDP, it seemed like the spin-off might struggle. MAFS is a show built on gossip, with a vast media infrastructure around it constantly digging up dirt about the contestants and their relationships both past and present.

Many of the big developments each season are basically spoiled weeks in advance and much of the fun is sharing in a national bitch session about a collection of people Australia knew nothing about a month ago. But that requires something to bitch about.

After a long-running decline in the quality of male entrants (culminating in last year’s season featuring a husband who punched a hole in a wall and didn’t instantly get thrown off the show), this year the men seem to be verging on the tolerable. There are still plenty of tattoos and bad haircuts, but when the worst you can say about them is that they’re emotionally inarticulate and maybe a little self-serving – apart from Steve, the older guy who doesn’t seem interested in actually communicating with his wife – things are looking up.

Calling it car crash television would be an insult to automobiles

The traditional pattern on MAFS is that the experts dress down the men, the men are the problem in the relationships, and at the dinner party each week the women turn on each other. With the men basically keeping their noses clean – even the one couple that seemed doomed because he forgot the rings and was late to the wedding have turned it around – it was up to the dinner party to toss a couple of cans of hair spray onto the fire.

Enter Brook. Or more accurately, re-enter Brook, who had mysteriously walked out on the show a few days earlier for no reason. Well, no reason unless you’d been following the outside gossip, which revealed she was pregnant with her ex’s baby. Her in-show husband Chris, who was not a promising candidate, seemed over it; MAFS  played audio of the producers trying to convince him to appear on camera when he clearly wanted to wash his hands of the whole thing.

But he had to be at the dinner party, so when Brook ‘surprisingly’ turned up and completely ignored him they could constantly cut to him looking shattered. She was back to have a good time with the girls – well, some of the girls, as she spent most of the party insulting everyone around her or calling them ‘babe’, which by the end of the episode felt pretty much like having some burly thug down the pub repeatedly refer to you as ‘mate’.

Calling it car crash television would be an insult to automobiles, which have airbags and crumple zones to protect their occupants. Brook gave it her all and then some; everyone else seemed bored and annoyed pretty much from the first ‘babe’. Would Married At First Sight: After the Dinner Party hosts Jules Lund, Brittany Hockley and Laura Byrne acknowledge that this kind of display is just how the game is played and give us a real glimpse behind the scenes?

Having people from the show on to talk about being on the show while the show is still on the air is probably one more layer of ‘reality’ than the MAFS premise can comfortably sustain. Here it plays out as just more of the commentary they all provide in snippets on the actual show: if you want extended couch chat that is still basically ‘I can’t believe they said that’, this is the show for you.

Few surprises in the ‘unseen’ footage

That’s not to say the couch chat is boring, just that it operates within the established parameters of MAFS. It might be behind-the-scenes, but nobody breaks character and starts complaining about the producers or their lack of outside offers. Likewise, the unseen footage is (unsurprisingly) just expanding on what we’ve already seen. Bitchy people are even more bitchy, schemers are scheming even harder, mean girls are even meaner.

It’s not exactly news that reality television producers create storylines out of raw footage, shaping the audience’s perception of the participants to build tension and drama. The job of MAFS: ATDP is to reinforce this manufactured narrative; it even has expert John Aiken on to say pretty much what he says on the regular show.

The good guys get to come on and be shocked at unseen footage that shows the bad guys at their worst, there’s a game where a couple tries to guess who’s being referred to in a bunch of mean tweets (complete with a Chris Lilley reference), and Brook’s husband Chris turns up wearing a black singlet so he’s not beating the allegations any time soon.

If you’re a MAFS viewer who wants to stay in the show’s bubble a little longer, then MAFS: ATDP keeps the ball rolling. If you want to peel back the layers and try to uncover the reality behind the ‘reality’, seemingly most of what remains of Australia’s media ecosystem is happy to help.

Brook is already giving interviews to tell her side of the story. (Chris was a creepy loser! The producers egged her on! She’s already apologised for her bitchy behaviour!) It’s a game of he-said-she-said that never ends; at least the KFC looks tasty.

Married At First Sight is on everywhere all the time, and new episodes of Married At First Sight: After The Dinner Party are available on Stan on Wednesdays after the dinner party concludes.

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