The launch of "Married at First Sight" Season 1 may have raised a lot of issues but it also drew public interest that it gained 270,000 viewers on its first telecast. This number increased FYI's viewership by 64 percent. Does this mean that people are ready to accept the so-called social experiment reality series?

Fox's Alternative Entertainment EVP Simon Andreae described social experiment to The Hollywood Reporter: "When I think of a social experiment, I think of a world that is literally an 'experiment'. What are you trying to demonstrate, and what is the result? If you're trying to demonstrate how to win a million dollars, it doesn't feel much like an experiment. It's something designed to test people's morale and the laws in which we live and explore an environment in which people are tested to their capacity."

"Married at First Sight" Season 1 fits this description to a T. It echoes social experimentation in reality as it trails the lives of three couples who agreed to get married on the day they met their partners in the altar. But what makes it popular to people?

Amberley McCracken has the explanation: "Social experiment reality shows, like interpretive research experiments are exploratory information gathering missions. This is a possible reason that these types of experiments make for better television; they begin with blank hypotheses, open-ended research questions and allow the viewers as individual 'researchers' to develop their own guesses at what the outcomes of the experiments will be, rather than constraining the story with pre-conceived molds for the results to fit into."

This means that with social experiment reality series, viewers are not only limited to watching - they also go on reflecting on what is happening and what is going to happen, and make their own guesses or assumptions. This then grows their interest and this is what makes "Married at First Sight" Season 1 a success.