One of the first all-queer reality series The Ultimatum has announced that filming for its second season is complete only days after Pride month comes to a close. The much-anticipated second season of Netflix’s The Ultimatum is currently in post-production, according to Variety, and will prove to be a ground-breaking sequel to the highly acclaimed first season. Six couples were being followed in the inaugural episode of the will-they-won’t-they show as they debated whether to be married or call it quits and go on.
The show, which is hosted by the celebrity pair Nick and Vanessa Lachey in real life, takes viewers on an eight-week journey of discovery with the duo. The participants in the social experiment grow to know one another as they converse frequently about their relationship problems. After a few weeks, the couples are split up and must decide who they want to live with for three weeks in order to develop their relationship further. By the time it’s over, some couples will have broken up, while others will have gotten engaged or married.
The cast of The Ultimatum will be fully made up of queer competitors, the majority of whom identify as female, as opposed to last season’s purely heterosexual partnerships. For the future of reality television and the queer community as a whole, this is a tremendously exciting development. Dating programmes typically tend to stick to the model of a female and male partnership.
Although there has been inclusion on shows like MTV’s Are You The One?, Ex On the Beach, and even the perennially contentious A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, the ratio of queer vs. straight based reality dating shows is biassed in favour of the former. A show like The Bachelor feels like it will always be lost in a heterosexual norm, despite the fact that networks and streaming services like MTV and Netflix are getting it right and making progress.
Chris Coelen, executive producer and CEO of Kinetic Content, is passionate about moving forward and bringing more LGBTQ+ love and heartbreak tales to the fore. Coelen expressed his enthusiasm for the release of the second queer-only season while serving as executive producer for The Ultimatum, Love is Blind, and Married at First Sight.
He said, “To me, the opportunity to tell lots of stories from lots of different people is really exciting and it’s less so about the particular format that we tell those stories in and more about the fact that we’re telling those stories.” As of right now, no release date has been set for the show’s upcoming Season 2.