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Have MKR girls become new gay role models?


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If you missed the headline, this is it: Carly and Tresne, sold as best friends to the two million-plus viewers of My Kitchen Rules every week, are in fact a gay couple.

Not the first gay people on television, but Australian television's first reality TV gay supercouple, perhaps.

But while the audience digest this rather large morsel, and its implications for a reality TV show where everything hinges on personality conflict and game play, it begs the question: in the heavily manipulated world of reality TV, just who is pulling the strings?

Carly and Tresne.

A question of timing ... Carly and Tresne gave an interview to a Seven-owned magazine revealing they are in a relationship despite MKR saying they requested not to be outed on the show.

The producers have said the decision to keep their sexuality out of the picture was made by the contestants themselves.

But the secret is out - literally - and the series is still on air, which means that irrespective of who made the original call, the declaration has all the hallmarks of a reality TV twist, designed to impact the game or the audience's perception of it.

Whether the decision to keep their sexuality a secret is indeed their own, based on a suggestion from the producers that it would heighten the impact of their on-air narrative, or some hybrid of the two, is almost beside the point now.

The inescapable truth is this: twists and turns are the highest denomination currency in the world of reality television.

Back in 2001, the producers of Survivor: Africa took the world they had constructed and tipped it on its head by forcing half of the members of each of the show's two tribes to pack their things and swap sides. In hindsight, and many twists later, it seems positively ordinary.

But the impact of that moment is still felt heavily in a genre which depends on "big moments" to take what is essentially a conversation between fans and punch a hole through the bubble and into the national conversation.

Some of those twists and turns are simply structural, such as reinstating previously jettisoned contestants on MasterChef, or staging fake evictions on Big Brother. Much like exchanging tribe members on Survivor, they are simply par for the course now and barely cause a blip on the radar.

Naturally, then, the format - and the audience - demand more, an increase in scale and impact. Twists and turns have to be cinematic, they have to deliver real jeopardy or they have to fundamentally shift your perception of "the game" or the people playing it.

Some of those moments simply arrive naturally, such as the Big Brother Australia season in which Bree Amer* was erroneously evicted due a computer error, and returned to the house after enduring an exit interview and saying her farewells, or the Big Brother eviction in which housemate Merlin Luck protested Australia's treatment of refugees by taping his mouth shut during his exit interview with host Gretel Killeen.

Others are clearly engineered by the producers, such as sending twins into Australia's Big Brother house - Greg and David Logan - and forcing them to play a single contestant "Logan" until the housemates worked out that there was something not quite right about their bedfellow. The same gimmick was inverted and played again several seasons later with two more Big Brother contestants - Karen and Krystal - who played as strangers in front of their housemates but were revealed to be mother and daughter.

The closest analogy to Carly and Tresne's revelation is perhaps that of Big Brother contestant David Graham who chose to use his appearance on the series as a platform to come out, not just to the television audience, and to his housemates, but to some members of his family as well, who were unaware that he was gay.

Such moments are challenging, and the impact is rarely lost on those who are the architects of them. Graham knew what he was doing, and clearly wanted to use the platform of the program to bring some illumination to the issue of gay visibility, which, ironically, seems to perplex society far more today than a decade ago when he spoke up and out.

Unlike most of the twists which are endemic to the genre, Carly and Tresne's declaration did not come via the program itself, but via New Idea magazine, which is owned by the Seven Network's parent company, and is used by the network as a promotional platform for the television series.

So, this is clearly different. Their message is not necessarily political, though the climate in which it has materialised - where gay marriage is debated by both sides of politics - is. And it cannot affect the outcome of the series? Or can it? Unlike some reality TV programs, such as Big Brother or The X Factor, audience voting does not shape the outcome of "the game" on My Kitchen Rules.

But it does shape the conversation which is framed around it and will perhaps help Seven push the already formidable ratings of the show - which sits shy of the two million viewer mark every week - even higher.

In marketing terms, the strategy has already paid off.

Carly and Tresne have shifted focus from the other contestants onto themselves, punctured the bubble of the national conversation and perhaps even carved for themselves a place in a somewhat peculiar pantheon of TV characters, which includes Sara-Marie, Merlin, Farmer Dave, Gav and Waz, Karen and Krystal, Logan Greg and Logan Dave.

*Corrected: Original report incorrectly had Bree Desborough, who is a Home and Away actress.