Move over Love Is Blind, there’s a new unholy dating show in town—and this one’s somehow even messier than its predecessor. In The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, Nick and Vanessa Lachey return to our screens as hosts of an even more diabolical scheme.
The formula: Six couples, each of whom contains one partner who wants to get engaged and another who’s hesitant, agree to speed date with one another. Each new couple then shacks up for a three-week trial marriage. (Yes, you read that correctly; no, they cannot text their ex during this time.) And then? It’s time to move in with their long-term partners for a three-week dry run of their own. In the end, each person must choose: stay in the old relationship or pursue a new one.
The result? A mess that would send even Mary Poppins and her talking umbrella flying for the hills chanting, “Nope, nope, nope” in unison; clashes in communication that feel equivalent to a semi truck turning over on the interstate and crushing at least five mid-sized sedans; a white-knuckled emotional rollercoaster for all of us at home wondering, over and over again, “Are any of these people going to be, like... OK?”
Alright, perhaps I’m exaggerating—a little. But if you thought Chris Coelen’s pod-based dating show was surreal, rest assured that you do not yet know chaos. This. This is chaos.
The casting parameters for this show appear to be the same as most other Netflix reality shows. While the mix is far less homogeneously white than, say, The Bachelor, everyone featured is still 1.) straight and 2.) thin and conventionally good-looking. There are no heels like Love Is Blind’s Abhishek “Shake” Chatterjee, but there are definitely a few questionable dudes in the bunch.
One character who ruffles a lot of feathers? Colby Kiss, a 25-year-old cowboy hat aficionado who issued the ultimatum to his girlfriend of one and a half years, Madlyn Ballatori (24). Throughout the season, Colby finds himself at odds with a couple cast members, including Madlyn—although it’s hard to think of any couple that makes it through this show or even the first episode without a little turmoil.
Other stand-outs among the cast include 24-year-old Rae Williams and 25-year-old Zay Wilson, known collectively as “Rae and Zay,” and Jake Cunningham (26) and April Marie (23). Rae is mild-mannered and a little emotionally reticent; Zay is more volatile. April is perhaps the bubbliest in the cast—and the most likely to pop off when provoked. Jake, meanwhile, has roughly the same energy as an Ed Sheeran song. Both couples have been together for two and a half years. Rae and April issued the ultimatums to their respective partners, both of whom say they feel they need better communication to move forward.
The series debuts its first eight episodes on April 6, with the remaining two—the finale and reunion—set for the following week on April 13. And much like Love Is Blind, The Ultimatum goes down fast. Viewers will undoubtedly hoover up every scrap of drama from the first eight episodes and return eager for more.
That said, the pacing can feel a little rushed, especially in the beginning. The speed-dating portion, especially, feels like an under-explored recipe for chaos. Consider Are You the One?, in which housemates move from one hook-up to another in search of their Person. While The Ultimatum makes no effort at matchmaking (that could be an interesting twist!), it could still be fun to watch these couples fish around in the dating pool a little longer than the show’s allotted week.
But Coelen and his crew did come up with one especially evil idea. Throughout the series, the men and women reunite in groups—and sometimes all together. These mixers inevitably become a veritable feast of schadenfreude—cast members listening in tense silence as their partners name whom they’d most like to hook up with, women navigating how to talk about their budding relationships with each other’s boyfriends to their faces, and dudes insisting on switching seats to prevent a violent outburst.
At the same time, some of the couples’ more personal arguments can be difficult to watch—even for those of us well-practiced in the art of reality TV-based voyeurism. In a couple cases we witness behavior that vigorously flirts with the proverbial line, fights in which one side’s conduct becomes difficult to watch. As deliciously engrossing as this brilliant achievement in small-screen sadism undoubtedly is, it also leaves a slightly sour aftertaste.
