Netflix’s ‘The Ultimatum’ Is Better Than ‘Love Is Blind,’ At Least

Netflix has a new number one show, and we’ve veered back into an era where a reality series is dominating the charts. We’ve seen this before recently with Love is Blind, and now its sibling series, The Ultimatum, has ascended in the same way.

The two shows share both their pair of hosts and their tight timetable. Nick and Vanessa Lachey are back, and this time, The Ultimatum appears to have been crafted on something that happened in their own relationship, where the pair took some time apart to date another person, then reunited to be stronger than ever and move forward with marriage.

So that’s what this is, only a bit more…demented?

The Ultimatum takes six couples that are all in the same position. One person has issued an “ultimatum” of the other person that they want to get married, and the other person is balking. Sometimes there’s a specific issue, like one woman who absolutely does not want kids issuing an ultimatum that her boyfriend must get past that, or move on. But most of them are just whether or not the other person is ready to get married or not. It’s usually the guy who isn’t.

The weird twist here is that all these couples are thrown together and then paired off into new couples that will live together in a “trial marriage” for three weeks. Then, they’ll return to their original partners for another three weeks, and at the end, must make a choice to break up, pursue a relationship with their new “roommate” or marry their original partner.

The show is eight episodes deep with the finale and reunion coming next week. And man, it’s super weird. Engaging, but weird, and probably better than Love is Blind.

Love is Blind has essentially become a show that’s “should you marry this person you just met three weeks later?” The answer is generally no, of course, but the show’s main premise, that they’ve never seen the person for the first few episodes they talk, remains kind of stupid because the show just refuses to cast any unattractive people, not to mention it’s never truly blind in the pods, as they always talk about things like race or height or even weight there. Then the show forces them to live together to decide if they want to marry this person that quickly. It’s a watchable mess, but pretty bad.

The Ultimatum is also bad, but at least interesting. Things get extremely weird because the contestants all routinely hang out together in large groups. So you’ll have people who are now living with each other’s boyfriends and girlfriends discussing how that’s going with one another, which is as awkward as you might imagine. While I don’t know what’s going to happen in the finale, out of six couples that started, two got engaged before the “trial marriages” even began, mainly because they seemed to be left out of the musical chairs game that had them paired with no one by the end. The other four seem unlikely to end up with the person they were roommates with, and half of them seem like they will break up entirely due to inherently toxic relationship dynamics.

I’d argue the closest thing this season has to a villain is Colby, an initially charming guy who ends up hooking up with girls at clubs off-camera (these shows are so bad at capturing anything that happens outside of super-select places) and he claims it was to “make the experience feel real” for his girlfriend and says it’s what she wanted. It’s very easy to hate Colby.

The closest thing to a possibly functional relationship is Jake and April, though they’re a whole thing by themselves. Jake actually did bond hard with another girl during his time with her (April lived with Colby, and ain’t nothing happening with that long term), but Jake and April seem locked in, with April desperately trying to get pregnant at 23 and start a family immediately. If Jake left her for the other girl, it would be a pretty big shock for the finale. But I doubt he will.

In any case, The Ultimatum season 2 has already been greenlit, and it is said to be an LGBTQ focused season, something Love is Blind (and most mainstream reality romance shows) have yet to do. We’ll see if it’s less or more of a mess than season 1 soon enough, I imagine.

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