Gilda.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. There's no better way to unwind at the end of a long day of work than binging on reality TV. From the Bloc to Celebrity Treasure Island, Kiwis have always had a soft spot.
For the genre.
Right now, the country is obsessed with Married at First Sight New Zealand, back for its fourth season after a five year hiatus, and while we may still be mad about the genre, a lot has changed for reality TV since the local version of the international hit debuted in twenty seventeen. Today on the Front Page, aut University senior communications lecturer Rebecca to Release joins us to discuss math's
obsession and the changing world of reality TV. Rebecca, you're a bit of a reality TV expert, hey, when it comes to your studies, aren't you.
Thanks for putting it that way. That's really kind of you. I did my PhD thesis on the reality television genre as a whole and the things that it does and does well, so yeah, in some ways, I maybe am.
I right to say that you've had first hand experience as well with this genre.
Yeah, so I was like a year in the first year of putting together what I would be researching. I actually appeared on a New Zealand reality show as well, which one was that I was in season two of The Bachelor New Zealand.
So obviously at the moment, now Married at First Sight New Zealand is airing and people are just absolutely obsessed with it. It comes off the back of the Australian version, which is also a huge hit. Here what is it about maths that captures the audience's attention.
I think it's really interesting because it's come off the back of the Australian Maths or Merit at First Sight, where there was so much talk about it, and to live up to kind of the drama that exists in maths Australia, it's a big task, but it's definitely taking on its own way into the maths format, this New Zealand version. I think there's also different reasons why we watch the different romance reality shows. So maybe you want to watch the risky, raunchy Love Island that maybe you
want to see the romance of the Bachelor. But for maths in particular, we're learning about commitment and we're learning about those long term relationships. And I think that that's its own unique way into looking at ourselves but looking at our society. And so in particular here we've got what is the society of commitment in alter or? It's really intriguing and I think we as viewers just want to know that, we want to understand that.
On three now week, I have another thing.
Are the couples up for the test?
Jeff Rockett?
How are you?
I just don't know what's really married at first Sight New Zealand stream first on three now.
I mean I've watched Maths for a fair few years now and I have noticed myself, especially with the Australian version just the last season, that the experts they're getting less lenient with things like gas lighting and toxic relationships and stuff like that. Do you think that coming into twenty twenty four there is much more of a focus on healthy relationships over maybe the dramatic launchy ones that we like to watch.
And I think with something like Maths, which has been going for a few years, we're about ten eleven years after the first one over in Europe now, so there was a period where the experts weren't calling participants out, and so because they weren't doing that, the responses from media who were following the show, from the audiences who were then commenting on the show, they started to hold
the experts accountable a bit more. And so there's like a slight shift and actually the experts realizing the audience wants to see these people being called out, and so now we can see those same behaviors that we're wanting as audience members playing out on screen as the experts talk about those words like being gaslet or the word recently that we might have learned was the avoidant attachment style and that didn't even come from one of the
experts this last week. But we're learning the types of words that we should be looking out for and that we maybe already recognize. We just need the language of them.
Dating shows have a pretty long history in New Zealand and around the world.
Why does that subgenre appeal to us so much?
Or we're all humans like this is one of our basic needs is to connect to someone else, to have some type of not necessarily romantic or love connection, but a connection, and to have that feeling of being seen by someone else and so while we might have those reality shows that focus on a skill set or like it's a competition to get to the end, romance shows are really something that every single human can relate to, whether or not we want that form of connection or
if we have a desire for that connection. There has been research into why audiences choose particular versions of shows that they're watching, and they found that the values that the person has in themselves in their own life tends to inform the shows that they look for. And so because so many humans have love and connection as this idea of that's an important value in their own life, they want to see those values played out on television.
I guess given these shows do still drop week to week rather than Netflix, you can binge everything in one weekend. I often think about the times when you'd be watching say Er, and everyone goes to work the next day and remembers when Dr Green died, right, and that's what everyone was talking about because everyone was watching it the night before. And if I've dropped any spoilers, it's been about twenty years.
Mark Dave.
This morning, I sent this on so that you might know who was thinking of you all. I'm hid it. He appreciated knowing you would remember him well.
But I mean, I guess that sense of it coming out every week is something like this really our last true water cooler shows.
I guess absolutely. The appointment television. It was something that television has built into us as viewers from the very beginning. So even if television was only being broadcast a couple of hours at nighttime, we would schedule our lives around making sure we were sitting in front of it. Now this is generations ago, so this wasn't me personally, but
now I do actually schedule my life around television. And when I was younger, it was to make sure that one night of the week you could watch say Er or Gray's Anatomy or something, as it was broadcast and you couldn't catch up on streaming. You might have to wait for the recap the next episode a week later. We actually schedule our lives around having access to that information that we can then have conversations the next day.
And so now that we have streaming services where you can binge twelve episodes over a weekend, it's kind of counting on everyone being available for that one weekend to watch the entire thing. In one go. And so when we go back to these formats that are kind of drip feeding the content out to us, it forces us as an audience to be drawn back to how they're telling us to consume. We can't just leave it until two nights later because there's two more episodes now, we're
so behind. So being able to put them out at a specific time on a specific day, it's encouraging the audiences to actually put in that effort. It's not as easy as just putting something on the streaming service anymore. I need to be there at a specific time and place.
Maps New Zealand has returned after a few controversies in its past, most notably I remember in twenty nineteen Chris Mansfield and is on screen. Brider actually edited out of the third season before it went to air after it was discovered he had domestic charges against him in the US. What safety measures are there to protect the talent on these shows?
That example is really interesting because there was concern about the wife he was married to, you know, like was she being put in a safe situation. The idea of casting these shows and doing checks before someone arrives on the show, that is a responsibility of production to make sure that they know everything about someone. There's also that negotiation from the participant in ensuring that everything is shared
as well. And so while production for that specific example said that they did the checks they could, but I mean it doesn't appear if it was in a different country or something. They do have to rely on the participant as well. So there's this kind of negotiation between two parties there as to how a situation like that happens.
And it also happened with f Boy Island. A participant also hadn't necessarily declared, and there again were issues around the specific thing that he had been accused of in a romantic setting. Now, these contestants could have been in a different type of format, different show that wasn't relying on their ability to perform in a relationship. They could
have been in a cooking contest. But because these shows were specifically about being an intimate, vulnerable conversations and settings like they're physically married and staying in a room together overnight, there is a duty of care that is required. But I'm not sure how that could be prevented unless production and participants are working together on that. I couldn't believe it.
The thought of being married after a stranger, especially when it's so easy to just google and see that his name was attached to something so violent. It really scared me for the women that were potentially going to be his bride.
When you were on The Bachelor, did you feel looked after by the producers behind the scenes.
I feel like my time on the second season of The Bachelor had different kind of stays. There's like the before you actually go on the show and there was minimal contact you're actually in the show, and once you're in production, it's all consuming and it is like an entire bubble that you cannot escape even if you wanted to, Like, you've got no phones. We were overseas. If you've got no phone, how do you get to a plane to
leave the country. We were living out remotely in the north of Aucklands, so there was no way to actually leave. You're constantly kind of reinforced about how great it is that you're here, this is an opportunity, and that you shouldn't leave. And there was a point where people were leaving, contestants were leaving, and we were told no one else is leaving now, like this is that you're here, you
made this decision. I think in terms of being supported during the show, if something perhaps didn't go well, if something happened behind the scenes, then you would be rewarded with perhaps a date or time alone. So that idea of what is the reward is not actually support or help. It will help you get further in the show. You
can get more screen time or something. It was a weird setup, but you could definitely see that if someone went through something behind the scenes that explains why they got a date, even if narratively it didn't make sense in the show why someone got a date. I think after the show then becomes like a different stage. And so when you've been enveloped in this experience, for me personally, it was six and a half weeks of literally everything that you were doing, every single date, every moment is
for the creation of a show. When you leave the show, it is completely like so jarring to go back to actually your home and to see your family again. And so in terms of support from production, once you go, it is very much waiting out the time for your next contractual obligations. So if there are upcoming marketing interviews that you have to go to I know for me personally, I did ask for support and it took two weeks for me to actually talk to someone and I was
awarded one hour with a psychologist. That one hour wasn't enough. But again this was also in twenty sixteen, and there has definitely been a lot more awareness now and so in the last eight years, I could only assume that production has absolutely taken what people have said on board and are actively trying to make their productions a safer space.
Well, we've heard some horror stories from over in the UK, for instance, the Love Island cast about what kind of support is and isn't given to them after the show airs, because that's when you get your phone back and you don't know how you've been edited.
Have you been edited as the villain for example? And now you've got to face all this barrage of social media keyboard warriors.
I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who can't understand why someone in a position who seems to have everything could take their own life. But you know what it's like to have everyone looking at you, everybody talking about what are the pressures like when you come out of a show like Love Island in reality.
You're in such a hire when you leave, and then to come out and be bombarded with everyone's opinions on like whatever you do a relationship, what you're wearing, what you look like, is a lot to cope with.
That must be incredibly difficult to handle by oneself.
Absolutely, for years afterwards, I would still have strangers recognizing me and telling me what my PhD thesis was on, because that became part of the show, part of the story and the show. Even if myself, as a person standing in front of them was saying to them, I assure you, that is not what I was writing about. That is what the show was saying. That is what the media was saying around the show. They still would
not believe you, the person in front of them. It was fascinating from this perspective of why do we trust what a show is giving us more than an individual. Why do we trust the media reports around something rather than an actual person. It doesn't matter how many times you could say something. That whole way of presenting someone else's character in a production, there's so much responsibility in that,
and it's tricky. It's so strange because to me, I'm like my role here at aut is to be talking through what is the impact and role of media in our society and to have actually gone through this experience of I don't understand how I can say the same thing in twenty three different interviews the exact same way, and yet I can read twenty three different angles into what I said. It's quite fascinating, but at the same time it's quite horrible.
Would you do it again?
Yeah, that's a super crazy question. I would not do it again. But also because it's eight years later, it's the kind of thing in your life where you go back and you go, oh, I see who I am now as a person because of going through that experience. And I think one way to think of it is like,
do you regret doing it? If I hadn't have done it, I would have been eight years later regretting not having tried, because ultimately, I mean, for me personally, why are went on a show is like I wanted to find love, and coming off the back of season one of Art
and Matilda, it absolutely could happen. We're still nine years later, I guess at this point, following them and the birth of their children, it's incredible the love that they found and the chance to actually go on and perhaps get that that was too good to pass up.
And we've seen a bit of a reality check over Reality TV in the last year. How there have been calls for the stars to unionize and lawsuits have been filed and some upheld over allegations of mistreatment on SAT, poor conditions of filming, pushback over howe were portrayed.
Does Reality TV need a reset?
I think Reality TV needs to actually start considering participants as just as important as the level of technology that they're using to film that the level of marketing budget that they have. They need to consider the same importance of care and creation of the character within the show. One of the foundations that are fighting for this in America that you can foundation They're like, people are not
props pretty much, you're just a body. In some shows, you were just there to physically just deliver the things in order to make everything else about the show do really well. But the participant is perhaps the lowest on
the level of priorities. And you know, we do actually want to know about people, Like when we think about why society are watching television, why we're watching reality television in particular, is because we want to know why people decisions, how are people behaving, and how do we agree or disagree with their behaviors. We're actually watching the shows for the participants. We're not watching them because it's got amazing
high quality standards. We're not watching it for anything else other than we want to be seeing ourselves or we want to be feeling better about ourselves because of the participants. It's not just on the producers either. This is on the audience as well. If there were no participants, there wouldn't be a show, So let's try and treat them with a bit more respect.
Thanks for joining us, Rebecca.
That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzidherld dot co dot z. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and sound engineer Patti Fox. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in on Monday for another look behind the headlines.