And that makes me … what? Leopard food? I’m sensible enough to know that, on my wedding day, all eyes will be on the bride.
Mine certainly will be, and that’s exactly how I want it. But I’m not marrying some venomous bridezilla, and she’s not marrying a brain-dead blow-up doll. In our view, we’re in this together.
On television, there is no “together.” There’s only the bride. And chances are she’s pissed about something.
For a show aiming to cash in on our culture’s obsession with weddings, “The Wedding Bells” has a surprisingly dim view of the ritual. It’s not about love. It’s about commerce.
It’s about narcissism. It’s about melodrama. Which explains why the episode ends with the band belting out “I Will Survive.
” Romance is dead, apparently, even on the most romantic day of your life.
"The Wedding Bells,” of course, isn’t supposed to represent actual weddings. These are showbiz, made-for-TV nuptials.
Weddings seen through blood-coated glasses. But when my fiancée and I sat down to watch the pilot, we were surprised by just how divorced from reality the show is. Our wedding is only a couple months away, so we’re in full-on planning/panic mode.
We thought “The Wedding Bells” might be good for a tip or two, at the very least. Given that the show is about a family that organizes posh ceremonies, we were expecting lots of behind-the-scenes action—a wedding procedural, like “CSI,” only with couples instead of corpses. But we didn’t learn a thing.
It turns out “The Wedding Bells” is only incidentally about wedding planners. It’s just a backdrop for a garden-variety soap opera, which makes Fox’s whole wedding motif seem even more cynical, as if the mere mention of the word “wedding” acts as a highly addictive, gender-specific narcotic. ABC tried a similar trick this fall with its unsuccessful series “Big Day.
” The show, about one wedding unfolding in hourlong installments, was essentially “24” for women—a claim I’d feel bad about making except that ABC made that exact comparison on the show’s official Web site. (“The stakes are just as high,” a breathless synopsis reads, drawing upon the obvious parallels between weddings and nuclear war.
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