WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
If you’ve been following AfterEllen for awhile, you have heard our desperate cries for a lesbian-centered Netflix dating show. Well, you’re in luck, The Ultimatum just dropped their new sapphic themed season… and it’s just okay.
Lez back it up a little first. So, The Ultimatum is one of Netflix’s infamous dating shows that pits couples together and against each other. The idea of the show is they take couples where one person wants to get married, and the other doesn’t, so they issue an ultimatum. However, the twist is that for an amount of time the couples have to break up and “fake marry” other people. You can imagine how lesbians would behave in this environment. If you’re a fan of reality TV you know how much insatiable drama can occur, adding in lesbian and bi-sexual women could only take it to new levels! Except it doesn’t.
Netflix, it is greatly appreciated that we finally have lesbian representation in the reality TV docket. Although, we don’t seem to have plus size women and when we do it’s ALL they talk about. Likewise, there is a weird judgmental tone and erasure towards bi-women. The host of the sapphic season isn’t even gay! We could look past all of this (maybe) if the content within the show was at least entertaining. While watching this season of Ultimatum, the most interesting part is Vanessa coming between a couple and then ending up alone in the end. Where is the lesbian host or the bisexual women? Where is The L Word level of representation plus accuracy?
However, there are a lot of things that this season of The Ultimatum gets right. For example, there is little talk about traumatic coming out stories. The focus isn’t about being gay, more so on love. Similarly, the show itself does not scream about being lesbian/bi-sexual centered, and instead treats the show as normally as they would a straight themed one; in the same vein, Netflix sexualizes the women in the same way they do straight couples on their other dating shows. While we’d prefer not to over-sexualize women, the argument can be maid that all the casts are being treated equally in that regard. Progress, not perfection, we suppose.
While we love to see a whole season filled to the nines with lesbians, there is not anything overly stimulating about it. The most entertaining episodes are the first couple where they are breaking up with their girlfriends and finding other ones, and the reunion episode where we find out who stayed together and who didn’t. The Ultimatum is exactly as advertised, so it will leave viewers not dissatisfied but not exactly enthused either. The amazing part about the show, though, is that it’s an entire season filled with lesbian and bisexual women. Even if it’s the bare minimum, we’ll take it.
The Ultimatum is now streaming on Netflix as of 2023.
