CRICKETS MAFS used to have paps camped outside the apartments. This year, barely anyone showed up.

There was a time when finding the Married At First Sight cast in Sydney required very little investigative journalism.

You went to Green Square. That was it.

For months before a new season aired, photographers would hover around the cast apartments, contestants would emerge in various states of commitment-ceremony distress. A steady stream of spoilers, couples, break-ups and questionable outfits would make their way onto entertainment websites across the country.

This year, something is noticeably different. Nobody seems particularly bothered.

So Sydney! understands that paparazzi presence around the Green Square apartments has fallen dramatically during filming of the upcoming season, with several people who ordinarily follow the production describing interest in the new cast as unusually low.

One photographer who has covered previous seasons told So Sydney! that even recognising the incoming contestants has become a problem.

“If I saw one of them walking down the street, I probably wouldn’t even recognise them,” he said.

Another familiar face within the MAFS media ecosystem, MAFS Funny‘s Josh Fox, is feeling it too.

“I’m thinking of rebranding from MAFS Funny to MAFS Fatigued. I’ve been to a couple of shoots for the upcoming season, I’ve met a few of the cast and I’ve then asked myself: can I be bothered?” He tells us.

Fox says the difference compared with previous years has been noticeable.

“Usually this time of the year there’s endless interest from viewers, any spoilers we get going viral and hype constantly building, but this year it all feels a bit meh and that people aren’t clicking or caring.”

Apparently, some of the contestants haven’t got the memo…

So Sydney! has been told that one couple from the upcoming season recently approached a photographer offering exclusive imagery in exchange for payment.

According to the photographer, the offer was immediately declined. The reason was fairly brutal: they simply weren’t interested.

That is an unusual position for a franchise that has spent years feeding an entire industry of photographers, entertainment reporters, fan pages and spoiler accounts long before the first wedding makes it to television.

The paparazzi around Green Square have traditionally supplied much of the imagery that fuels pre-season speculation. Once the show begins airing, they’re also the ones providing the almost endless secondary cycle of stories about which couples are still together, who has been spotted where, and what happened during filming.

So, why the change?

Production also appears to have become considerably tighter around access to this year’s cast. Naturally, this has made spontaneous photographs and interactions more difficult than in previous seasons.

And while that might make sense from a spoiler-control perspective (or from an avoiding-Bondi-Icebergs-incident-2.0 perspective), it also creates a slightly awkward problem. If you make the cast harder to photograph, the enormous pre and mid-season hype machine MAFS has historically relied on starts looking pretty damn quiet.

Reality television has been here before.

In one of the final seasons of The Bachelor, the producers relocated the casts’ mansion and made it incredibly difficult to capture content mid-filming. The result? To our knowledge, the lowest-ranked season of all, and the start of the end for the series.

Because as soon as long-running franchises lose the off-screen ecosystem around them, there’s immediately less material for paps, fan accounts, entertainment outlets, and ultimately, audiences, to work with.

And while that doesn’t necessarily mean the next season of MAFS is destined to flop, it isn’t necessarily a good omen either. After all, this time last year, photographers were chasing contestants down the street. This year, those same photographers are asking whether they can even be bothered anymore.