Married at First Sight UK, produced by CPL Productions, returned for its fifth season with strong ratings when it premiered on October 6 on Channel 4 in the UK.
The season premiere averaged 1.624m viewers and peaked at 2.335m, making it Channel 4’s second highest rating show of the day after The Great British Bake Off. With a 10.7% market share, it’s the best overnight share for a launch episode of Married at First Sight UK ever – beating the 1.1m (6.9%) slot average and 1m (5%) who tuned into the season four launch in April 2019.
Consolidated figures for the Married at First Sight premiere episode were an impressive 2.3m with an additional 240k views on catch up service, All4.
Married at First Sight UK is TV’s most talked-about social experiment, where strangers meet and marry for the first time at the altar.
In Season Five, the UK singles are paired by two of the world’s best matchmakers: Oprah’s ‘Love Doctor’, Paul C. Brunson, known as the ‘real life Hitch’ and a dating agent on E4’s Celebs Go Dating; and leading UK matchmaker Genevieve Gresset. They are assisted in their love matching by psychologist, Dr Angela Smith.
The new series follows the couples, from being matched, to getting married, to going on honeymoon and beginning their lives as newlyweds just as lockdown hit, putting extra pressure on their fledgling romances. The refreshed series charts each couples’ efforts to make life as husband and wife work, before they make a crucial decision – whether to part ways or remain in wedded bliss.
The Married at First Sight format is created and produced by Snowman Productions in Denmark for DR3/DR1, and is distributed by Red Arrow Studios International, with local productions in over 29 territories worldwide.