I Know It’s True, ‘Cause I Saw It On TV

As I said yesterday, I’ve spent an entire week watching every wedding-related reality show I could pick up on my cable package. It’s been grueling. I never realized how many shows there are on TV about wedding planning, or how little useful information can be gleaned from most of them.

I did, however, pick up on some interesting social messages these shows are trying to sell us on, many of which I found outright bizarre as well as unhelpful. Here’s what I kept seeing on show after show:

1: Budgets are made to be broken, and anyone who tries to keep one intact is the villian of the piece. Again and again I saw fathers, grooms, and even the occasional bride called cheap or gazed upon more in pity than in anger because they felt it was unreasonable to blow the budget by the equivilant of the Gross National Product of Brazil. I saw wedding planners work with brides and their mothers to ‘hide’ expenses from daddy so he wouldn’t blow his top – expenses like a second multi-thousand dollar reception dress because the multi-thousand wedding gown was too much to boogie in all night long. I heard a bride chastised for thinking since the flowers didn’t mean that much to her she’d rather get them from a grocery store than a professional florist, even if she could get more flowers for a hundred dollars less and was at least as happy with the result.

2: Wedding planners are wonderful even when they don’t do their jobs well. Some of the planners I watched did a really fabulous job. A couple even attempted to keep the budget from completely skyrocketing completely out of control. One amazing one even got a couple pretty much everything they wanted for two thousand dollars less than their stated budget, and said budget was well under $20,000 to begin with. On the other hand, there was no negative commentary on the wedding planner who allowed an $8,000 backyard wedding to bloat into a $30,000 backyard wedding even with the bride managing to borrow a lot of plants and decorations. This is also the planner who envisioned a dramatic, billowy fabric curtain to define the wedding/reception areas of the yard and allow the bride a dramatic entrance…only to discover the night before the wedding that she needed another fifty yards of fabric to make it happen.


3: If it costs more, it’s better. The budget alternative never seemed to be offered as a positive thing. On the other hand, there’s Platinum Weddings which is purely about pricetags, but never adds up the final budget. As I watched that, all I could think was ‘wow, I could have had my entire wedding twelve times over for what this couple spent on flowers.’ It’s not even than I have a problem with rich people spending that kind of money on weddings. If you’ve got the money and want to spend it that way, I’ve completely got your back. I just don’t think that random price tags on extravagant weddings equal useful information for the average viewer.

4: Brides fall into two categories: the confused and the bitchy. If a woman didn’t really know what she wanted or how to get it, she was presented as adorably at sea and the wedding planner indulgently saved her from her sad little self. If she knew what she wanted and tried to get her way, she was presented as controlling and pushy and the wedding planner would be forced to lock horns with her to have a good wedding over the bride’s dead body. Yes, this is an exaggeration, but a sadly slight one.

5: No matter how badly the budget is blown, how badly daddy is duped, how nasty the bride is, how incompetent the planner is, or how many relationships are destroyed in the planning of a wedding, it’s all worth it in the end because the bride gets to be a perfect fairy princess for a day, and that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? In fact, there was one couple whose ‘wedding’ was purely show since the groom’s divorce from his last marriage hadn’t come through as of their big day, and the area they live in requires a thirty-one day waiting period after the final divorce decree is granted before he can marry again.

Yes, even that one was presented as worth it.

In spite of it all, though, there was one couple I watched tie the knot who I felt truly got things right. The bride was knowlegable and in charge without being presented in a bad light, the groom cared without being presented as a zoological oddity, and while the budget was clearly astronomical, it was equally clear these were people who could afford it, and they kept putting their guest’s requirements at the top of their budget priorities.

A planner had been brought in because the bride’s father – who was a Holocaust survivor – had recently been declared to be in the terminal stages of the cancer he’d been battling for several years. The bride and groom felt it was important for her father to be there and able to participate fully, so they moved the wedding date up by four months and arranged for several of his oldest friends – some of whom he hadn’t seen in over twenty years – to come over from Europe.

When the couple first announced their engagement, her father told them that all you need for a wedding is: ‘a Rabbi, a chuppah, some herring, a good shot of vodka, and a klezmer band.’

During the reception, the bride and groom made sure her father got what mattered to him. They’d already had the Rabbi and the chuppah in their wedding ceremony, so they gave her father a bit of herring, shared a toast of good vodka with him, and revealed the klezmer band.

After four days of watching brides, their planners, and everyone around them make each decision all about themselves, it was a breath of fresh air to watch this couple do everything in their power to make their wedding day special for someone else.

I wish them all the best. They were the one couple I felt actually had a lesson to teach the rest of us.

6 Responses to “I Know It’s True, ‘Cause I Saw It On TV”

  1. Anon says:

    I watch a lot of the bridal goop on Style network and WE (embarrassingly enough, I love Bridezillas. It’s like cheese fries for my brain. I know it’s sick and wrong, but I love it so much!)

    You’re absolutely right in your observations – brides are either bitches or dingbats, budgets are meant to be blown and grooms and fathers are just there to be fooled about the amount of money. And it’s all worth it in the end for the fairy princess wedding. In all of that, I’ve never caught that last one that you mention – I hope I do sometime. It sounds like a breath of fresh air.

    And a small ramble – one of episodes (I believe it was “Whose Wedding is it Anyway?”) that annoyed me ROYALLY involved a planner dealing with a couple who had left a lot of stuff to the last minute. The groom’s mother was going to make the cake, and the planner got all huffy and responded with “I don’t have Betty Crocker cakes and canned frosting at MY weddings.” I remember shouting at my TV “it’s not YOUR wedding, you nasty little man, SHUT UP.” I clearly need help.

  2. I love those shows! I have become addicted — I don’t have a TV at home, but when I visit my boyfriend, it’s watch TV or eat (or both) while he’s at work. No other options. None.

    The one important thing I have learned from the wedding shows is that if I ever get married, I am going to elope.

  3. the unfashionista says:

    I also really enjoy that episode of Whose Wedding is it Anyway, even though the bride spent, I believe, somewhere in the ballpark of $19,000 on her two dresses???, because she cared sooo much about making her father happy and making him proud and she was more psyched for her father to see the (ceremony) dress then for her fiance!
    Also, there is an episode of one of those shows where the wedding gets called off – that was an interesting twist!
    I think my favorite show was the one where the groom designed sneakers for a living and he actually designed the entire wedding color scheme and stuff, and he designed the bride’s gown because she had a crisis of confidence about the one she had bought, and she wound up looking absolutely beautiful. Neither of them was high maintenance, she didn’t want the perfect fairy princess wedding but they had been together since high school and were finally getting married like, ten years later, and they really just wanted to be happy and have a great wedding.

  4. amy says:

    there was one episode that just killed me. the bride was not a “girly girl” and the planner and the bride’s mom conspired to give her a froo-froo wedding that she absolutely didn’t want, criticizing her and the groom’s ideas along the way. this sort of stuff makes me very, very hesitant about hiring a planner. there’s no way one like that would be within my budget and i’m sure they just pick the dramatic ones for tv, but…still. it’s awful. and so, so entertaining.

  5. Seriously I am going to have to BUY a tape of these shows off someone! The closest we get to wedding TV is repeats of Bridezillas on Pay TV in Australia