Divorce is good for TV show ratings
Print Edition
Television has been playing matchmaker for decades with hit series like “The Dating Game,” “Blind Date” and “Married at First Sight.”
Now it is taking couples straight to the divorce courts.
The next big trend in dating shows is uncoupling, according to analysts at MIPCOM, the world’s top entertainment trade show, held every year at Cannes on the French Riviera.
Two new much-discussed French formats have a radical solution to marital discord — instant divorce.
Couples who take part in “The Break Up” and “Divorce for the Better” — clips of which were shown on Monday — have to agree to divorce, before what is left of their relationship is tested to see if it is worth saving.
Both shows urge the couples to embrace the single life again, sending them out on dates. The test is to see “if they can forget their marriage,” said Virginia Mouseler, a trends expert at The Wit, a media database.
‘New type of family’
In “The Break Up” couples must come together at the end of their trial separation to watch an excruciating “movie of their marriage” before deciding whether or not to tear up their divorce papers.
Those women who decide to go it alone could try their luck on another new show, “Bi the Way,” which posits that some might have been happier with another girl. The show claims that “one out of four women under 25 is bisexual.”
Even more radical is the new Danish show “Pregnant with a Stranger,” which liberates three single women looking for a man to have a baby with from the messy business of having to live with one. Its producers brought together a team of psychologists to help the women to create a “new type of family.”
Few relationships have less of a chance of survival as celebrity ones, and a British series plays on the idea that some of these starry love matches may have been only for the cameras.
ITV’s “Celebrity Showmance” puts highly unlikely celebrities together and challenges them to con social media users that their romance is for real.
“The couple with the highest number of likes and comments wins,” Mouseler said.
The same company has come up with another much-hyped show to test couples called “Bromans,” where a group of modern “himbos” are transported back in time to a Roman gladiator school with their girlfriends.
However bad marriages can be, they surely have nothing on the horror of having to spend a weekend locked in the office with despised colleagues.
That is the premise of the new American series “Inhuman Resources,” which is being billed as the first “corporate adventure show,” with work mates forced to bed down together and perform often humiliating tasks in the hope of building friendships and team spirit.
Talent shows, however, continue to have a stranglehold on television schedules, with Mouseler calling them “the king of genres at the moment.”
The new British series “Change Your Tune” turns the “Voice” format on its head by looking for contestants who sing like donkeys. The winner of the show is the one whose voice has improved the most after intensive coaching.
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