Cheat: Unfinished Business review – the single worst show that has ever been created

First, an important point of order. The new Netflix television series Cheat: Unfinished Business should not be confused with the Netflix television series Cheat. The latter was a 2023 gameshow hosted by Danny Dyer, notable for being forgettably bad. The former is a 2025 reality show hosted by Amanda Holden, notable for being the single worst thing that has ever been created in the history of humankind.

You might think this is an exaggeration, but that’s only because you haven’t just watched four episodes of Cheat: Unfinished Business in a row, and haven’t found yourself involuntarily clawing at your eyes in a doomed bid to injure any part of your brain that might remember watching it. I have. Quite frankly it’s a wonder I can still type.

Best described as a mutant cross between Jeremy Kyle and Love Island, Cheat: Unfinished Business is a reality show where eight former couples, whose relationship ended after real or perceived infidelity, are taken to stay in a luxury villa and either a) reconcile, b) fight or c) get off with each other behind their exes’ backs. In other words, it’s exactly as grim as it sounds.

Holden has two roles here, depending on what time of day it is. If it’s light outside, her job is to pull a concerned face and nod whenever any of the contestants say anything emotionally vulnerable. If it’s night, she shines her legs to a high reflective sheen, puts on a see-through dress and struts backwards and forwards in slow motion while making an expression as if she were holding in a potentially catastrophic bout of gastroenteritis.

Slightly more useful is Paul C Brunson, the show’s relationship coach. As an expert in his field, Brunson is able to offer genuine insight into the behaviour of the contestants, and tools to help them fix it. And though the filming traps him in a perpetual doom-loop of TikTok glow-up filters, he may be the best thing about the show.

Not yet ready to move on … contestants on Cheat: Unfinished Business. Photograph: Netflix

The point of Cheat: Unfinished Business (the colon and subtitle hinting at a wider Cheat Cinematic Universe floating about in the ether like some awful televisual night hag) depends on who you are. If you’re one of the contestants, then you ostensibly signed up to work through your relationship problems, even though you haven’t seen your former partner for months – or, in one case, years – and realistically should have started to move on by now. Also, you might be there because you are gripped by the bizarre desire to dig through the darkest and most personal moments of your life on a globally streaming television series rather than behind closed doors like a normal person, which suggests that you are at best insincere and at worst freakishly fame-hungry. At this point, it’s worth noting that some of the people here are from Love Island, so there’s a risk that they might shrivel up like a salted slug if people stop paying them attention.

On the other hand, if you’re one of the producers of the show, the point is clearly to create something emotionally manipulative enough to rival the viral clip from the Spanish reality show La Isla de las Tentaciones, in which a man named Montoya ripped his shirt open and howled at the sky after watching live footage of his girlfriend having sex during a thunderstorm.

The issue here, though, is that La Isla de las Tentaciones is a Spanish show full of people being incredibly Spanish, and Cheat: Unfinished Business is a British show about people being incredibly British. On the basis of the first four episodes, there is a comprehensive absence of drama here. Maybe a bit of sobbing. Maybe the sort of hushed “Leave him, he’s not worth it!” talk you hear outside pub toilets at half 10 on a Friday night. But that’s it. Entire episodes pass without a single thing happening. For something so desperate to be exploitative, it’s all unforgivably boring.

So, one star or zero stars? I’ve landed on the former because it isn’t entirely without merit – as far as I can tell, the cameras were all pointing the right way – but mainly because a zero-star rating suggests that this will be an entertainingly bad hate-watch. There is nothing entertaining to be found here. Don’t waste your time.