For Jamie, Married At First Sight Was More Like Disgusted At First Sight

Generally speaking, Married At First Sight is the kind of reality show that attracts the potential viewer with a splashy premise and then disappoints you by delivering a product that's actually much duller than its scandalous title suggests. (See also: Sex Sent Me To The ER, Buying Naked, and Sister Wives.) But its first episode did one thing right: it gave us a couple living through one of the most obvious bad results of a "social experiment" in which two people don't meet each other until the moment they're about to get married. Well, not a couple living through it. Just one half of the couple. Looking at the other. And thinking he's insufficiently cute.

As I noted in my post after last week's series premiere, all the hoo-ha over what great matches all the experts made kind of glossed over the fact that they were all drawn from a pool of fifty people, total. SO LET'S SAY you're Jamie Otis. Maybe the things your questionnaire indicated were important to you were that your spouse be very tall, blond, and close to his parents, and the nearest the experts could get with their available contestant pool was Doug. Jamie -- clearly -- is sincerely committed to finding true love: we've already seen her do it on one and a half other dating reality shows before this one. Of course she would believe that the smartest experts reality producers could find would hook her up with her perfect man. And then the doors open and she steps out to the aisle and at the end of it is a dude she knows ON SIGHT is not going to be right for her. It's not great.

And when I say that, I mean it's not great for Jamie. It's pretty great for me -- and for producers, too, who could obviously tell they had struck TV gold. The second Jamie's eyes land on Doug, she starts crying, and we know it's not because she's overwhelmed with joy that the time has finally come for her to join her life forever with that of her best friend, because as she's being dragged down the aisle basically weeping, she still doesn't know this dude's name. We then watch the officiant introduce Doug with Bridget Jones-style thoughtful details. See, Jamie? Doug likes to cook! Just marry him! So what if the sight of his face apparently made you recoil in horror?!

The series premiere ends just as Doug has said his "I do" and is waiting for Jamie to reciprocate, and the payoff of that cliffhanger is duly delivered in the second episode: after interview footage in which Jamie tells us that she just is not attracted to Doug and thinks she's made a huge mistake and trusted the experts to find her a man she could actually imagine spending the rest of her life with, she does take Doug in holy matrimony -- making sure in yet another interview to tell us it's largely because she thought she'd just get through the moment and then worry about the consequences later.

And, at first, "later" is just as uncomfortable and awkward. Jamie and Doug process out to the hallway outside the tiny meeting room in which the ceremony was held, and he opens their first-ever unmediated conversation by asking if she lives alone. Of course she does, she's thirty-five "twenty-seven." And Doug? Oh, he actually lost his job last year and moved back in with his parents. GREAT START, DOUG.

Then it's time for photos! Jamie, who would only let Doug give her a chaste peck on the cheek at the altar while getting the rest of her body as far away from his as it could go and still be within range of his lips, is not wild about getting the immediate aftermath of their sham wedding captured by a professional photographer, who then has to figure out how to shoot wedding photos for a couple in which half the participants is worried that they're going to be "too intimate." Can they kiss now? No. Will she sit in his lap? Maybe on the arm of his chair. She'll let him hold one of her hands as long as we can see that she's using the other one to push him away. As soon as she's released on her own recognizance, she can't even make it to the bathroom before she starts crying again and gets enclosed in a protective ring by a coterie of friends and female relatives -- including, in Jamie's lap, the flower girl. That's right, Jamie. Cry into this kindergartner's hair. Teach her that love isn't real, and save her mother the trouble of singing her any misandrist lullabies tonight.

Maybe it's because I'm not what you'd call, like, a "good person," but this is what I want to see in a show called Married At First Sight. As much as we all like to believe that what's inside is more important than the outside (just kidding -- even I will grant that it is), it doesn't mean that what's on the outside is totally unimportant. When love at first sight happens, it's not because what's apparent at first sight is the love object's soul, you know? Jamie's "at first sight" reaction to Doug may not bespeak a person who will automatically look past the superficial, and maybe she could have done a better job of choking down her bile if the first time Doug was presented to her as a potential mate he was sitting at a table in a Starbucks. But given that she was expected to look at him, form a judgment, and then marry him (fake-marry him for a reality show, but still), Jamie's unguarded reaction is kind of understandable. You can't help what you like, and what you don't, and she didn't, and the high (fake) stakes of the situation left her unable to feign excitement. As such, it made for good TV.

Unfortunately, the experts had matched Doug with the lady for whom Married At First Sight wasn't her first rodeo. And that's why even though he grossed Jamie out upon their first meeting, she knew that she had to put on her game face. She was still too rattled at the wedding photo shoot to turn it on...but at some point, Jamie clearly remembers that while the guy operating the still camera is drawing attention to himself by interacting with her, he's surrounded by a lot of other cameras, operated by people whose job it is to make her forget they're there. And she remembers she'd better quit giving them so much fodder to make her look bad. Look as bad as she is -- but still.

And that's when things turned around for old Doug. Oh, Doug gave a speech! Oh, Doug's so funny! Doug wants to dance? Then Jamie's going to dance! Jamie's going to loosen up! Jamie's going to have a goooooooood time! Jamie's going to do what she needs to do for as long as there are a bunch of cameras pointed at her, and when those cameras stop recording her movements, Jamie's going to go back to her real life...which I'm going to guess is not going to be lived in Doug's parents' basement.

We'll all fondly remember those few moments when Jamie dropped the happy mask of a social-experiment participant and showed us the true face of crushing regret. But that's over now. If the experts had wanted to make a show about six regular people sharing their real feelings about their temporary marriages, then they shouldn't have cast one who was already a reality veteran, which is to say, a semi-professional phony.