Let’s be honest: none of us are labouring under the illusion that either things that happen on reality TV or love are real. We’re grown ups now, we know they’re both fake – fairy tales meant to distract us in the few cold, bleak years we have until our inevitable, untimely death.
I might not be able to tell you how they make love look real, but I can provide the next best thing: a sneak peak into how the sausage that is a ‘Married At First Sight‘ wedding gets made.
In the interests of not being sued to death, our two sources will remain anonymous but I can tell you this about them: just kidding, I ain’t telling you shit, take THAT, ‘Married At First Sight‘ legal team.
Both of our sources were guests at Andy and Craig‘s wedding, which was an odd combination of a beautifully warm connection between the two very handsome men and the weird cadence of a painfully, painfully awkward celebrant.
On camera, the wedding itself was quite lovely, and, if you’re to go off how it was edited, about five minutes long in total. In reality it was shot over the course of a few hours, and the ceremony done a total of four times so that they could get all the necessary camera angles (one wide, one close-up, one mid shot and one with an honest to god drone, because we live in the fucking future).
The location for the wedding was, in no uncertain terms, shit hot, but it’s probably hard to really drink it in when it’s a 30 degree day, you’re seated in the sun watching the same wedding over and over again like some weird matrimonial ‘Groundhog Day‘ and no one is bringing you any water.
From both accounts, the wedding was really exciting and wonderful and emotonal the first time that they did everything, but the charm wore off as they saw the celebrant repeat the same mistakes every single time. Still definitely interesting, with one of our informants noting that they’d “never been to a wedding before where the [grooms] say ‘Hi, nice to meet you’”.
On paper, being a guest seems like a pretty good deal: you get flown to New Zealand with your food and accomodation paid for – except they were only there for two days, and (apart from the wedding) they weren’t allowed to leave the hotel, due to fears that they might run into the other guests and ruin the surprise for the grooms about who each other.
Additionally, some of the guests were holed up in a hotel without room service and had to do a low-key prison break to go out and get some food.
The reception was also pretty awks, with food not being served until super late, thanks to the crew wanting to wait until Queenstown‘s ridiculous late sunset to have the appropriate ~mood lighting~ for the dinner, and with the producers being very specific about the drinks they wanted people to be seen drinking:
“Everyone wanted coffee, but they wanted us all to have champagne because they wanted people to have to look they were having fun.”
The two groups never having met each other, the layout and the fact that half the people were mic’d up also made the conversation pretty stilted:
“No one made an effort to talk, the way the tables were laid out made it feel like a game show. We were joking that it was like ‘Game Of Thrones‘, like we were at the red wedding.”
It ended up being a 13 hour day that culminated in the most horrific of all human experiences: being forced to dance with no music. They did one take with a song and then basically tortured people by making them dance in complete silence so they could overlay music over it in post-production. Brutal.
Obviously it’s not at all surprising that a lot of careful production goes into these and that it takes a bunch of takes to get the final product, but it is interesting to know exactly how this shit goes down.
I’m still going to watch the show.
Photo: Channel 9.
