While on a family vacation to Tuscany, Italy last fall, I came down with COVID for the very first time.
Fun timing, right?
Well, it wasn’t that horrendous as I was able to rest up in a gorgeous old house with amazing, lush grounds and a beautiful pool. I felt like I was convalescing in the way that rich people used to back in the day – at least by way of what movies, TV shows, and books tell us.
I had also downloaded a bunch of Netflix shows onto my phone before the trip, and one of them was a reality show that I had been meaning to check out called The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On.
Well, as I waited for my fever to abate, I burned through the first three seasons of this reality show catnip-meets-shame spiral gem.
In short, if you’re into Love Is Blind’s weirdo combination of batshit ludicrous premise-meets-strangely compelling reality melodrama, there’s a good bet you’ll be sold on The Ultimatum.*
* Also see: Pop Thruster’s ultimate guide to watching Love Is Blind.
Also important to note: both Love Is Blind and The Ultimatum are hosted by the bland yet amiable power couple, Nick and Vanessa Lachey.
With The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On, the premise is slightly less ludicrous than Love Is Blind, but that’s amid the bonkers territory these kinds of dating-related reality TV shows tread and loiter in. Committed couples with issues or challenges of some kind join the show with the idea that they’ll explore dating someone else.
The show’s premise encourages them to flirt and date people from other couples – there will be six couples participating in Season 4, for example – and then new couples form and live with each other for several weeks as the cameras roll. They then return to their original person for several more weeks before ultimately (see the branding tie-in?) deciding whether they want to “marry or move on.”
The hijinks and fireworks come into play, as you can imagine, when all of the couples are constantly forced to hang out and socialize with each other within the hermetically sealed filming bubble that these kinds of shows operate in. In simpler language: we see how people react when the person they’re theoretically hoping to marry is dating other people… right in front of them.
The exquisitely perfect TV show to watch while recovering from COVID in Tuscany, in other words: easy on the brain, titillating in that shame-spiral-y way we like with these kinds of shows.
In The Ultimatum season 4 trailer, a young lady tells us, “To me, marriage is more than just being in love with somebody. I’m a high maintenance girlie – I have a lot that I want out of life.”
Her boyfriend then says, “I truly believe I would die without her.”
Later, another woman says, “His manipulative behavior is disgusting, it’s appalling.”
Those right there are chef’s kiss gold reasons why I’m still all in on The Ultimatum. Season 4 premieres on Netflix on July 15th, 2026.