Married at First Sight: A TV Literature Experiment

Richard O'Brien, Jack Nicholls

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Abstract

This chapter offers an account of a collaborative creative process undertaken by two poets in response to the third season of the Channel 4 dating reality show Married at First Sight. Having been commissioned to jointly produce a series of original poems, the authors decided to explore the creative and intellectual possibilities of blending the tropes and conventions of reality television with those of the sonnet sequence, a form with long-standing high cultural associations and concerned, in the public consciousness, with the declaration of enduring love. In this chapter, the eight original poems are interwoven with accounts of their development. The comparison of forms (the episodic series and the narrative-in-sonnets) reveals a productive dissolution of boundaries between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ artistic production.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTelevision Series as Literature
Subtitle of host publicationFrom the Ordinary to the Unthinkable
EditorsReto Winckler, Víctor Huertas-Martín
Place of PublicationSingapore
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Chapter19
Pages335-344
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9789811547201
ISBN (Print)9789811547195
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 4 Dec 2021

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