Carlo Boszhard is getting increasingly anxious: resistance to his questionable program Married At First Sight is suddenly increasing sharply. “This is just psychological torture.”
Can you get complete strangers to marry each other purely for the ratings? Is this still something that should be accepted in 2024? Prying into people’s lives so that the top channel of RTL 4 can rake in a bonus? There is increasing resistance to presenter Carlo Boszhard’s questionable TV show Married At First Sight.
TV torture
Carlo is accused in the Volkskrant of facilitating unacceptable behavior and now the AD is also getting over it. Angela de Jong, the newspaper’s frontwoman, is quite fed up with it. She writes a scathing piece in the newspaper every day and this time she puts Carlo and his colleagues on her chopping block.
This is not innocent TV entertainment, according to the opinion dragon. “Forget the idea that Married at First Sight is a fun dating program. It is a form of psychological torture, for the participants and the viewers.”
Helleveeg
Two of the strangers who were forced to marry by the TV makers are ‘poor Dirk and hell-bent Anneke’, Angela explains. There was an intense scene between them at the end of the show yesterday. “Of course he was at the end of the episode. This is one of those scenes where commercial TV makers are high-fiving behind the scenes.”
A fierce confrontation between the two has been carefully recorded. “The chairs were ready, several cameras set up at strategic points. This way, not a word or facial expression could be lost.”
Female Gordon
This Anneke is really terrible, Angela thinks. She describes her as ‘the female Gordon’. According to her, that confrontation with Dirk was horrible. “This went too far and should not have been broadcast to protect everyone involved.”
Angela sympathizes with ‘good guy’ Dirk. “Desperate people are unscrupulously used for high-profile TV under the guise of ‘a serious scientific experiment’. (…) Married at first sight is psychological torture, including for the viewer.”