ABSTRACT
The reality TV show Married at First Sight is forensic in its logic and its politics. The premise of the show—which started in Denmark in 2013, with subsequent versions of the same name and format appearing very soon after in the United States, South Africa, Australia, Israel, the United Kingdom, and many European countries—is made transparent in its title. Two volunteers, who have decided that algorithms and science will do a better job of finding a spouse than they have managed to do themselves, are matched by a team of experts. Though each has been through a similar process of having their data harvested by the analysts, the chosen couple’s first contact is when they are standing next to one another, in front of their families and friends, facing the official who then marries them. Although it is an audacious and often entertaining experiment, there is an underlying conservatism to its tenor and framing which is integral to forensic aesthetics. The success of the heteronormative experiment is judged according to whether or not the couple enjoy achieving the milestones that normal couples achieve: the wedding dance, the first kiss, the honeymoon, the consummation, the moving in together. Although the experts often seem like lovely people, I was yearning for some discussion within the programme of what they themselves learn along the way, and find frustrating about, the format. One series to another soldiers crassly on, using science to get beneath the mask of each participant to see which combination will provide the right answer as evidenced by the successful meeting of targets. The play to which I devote this chapter, Phil Porter’s Blink (2012), is also a narrative in which two people who have not found romantic partners find one another in an unusual fashion. The liaison presented in Blink, however, is an ethically and aesthetically challenging one that defamiliarises networked living and defies norms of co-dependency. Porter’s play interrogates the precepts of forensic culture that are taken for granted in and reinforced by Married at First Sight.
