There’s a lot of TV out there, and some of it claims to be “reality,” something I am not normally a fan of but I will admit that there are one or two I do enjoy in small doses.
This week’s show is the old We TV reality standby Bridezillas.
What’s the premise?
Some brides are just such terrible people when it comes to their big day, that they do awful things to everyone around them. The show treats this for laughs, often at the brides’ expense.
What’s the appeal?
There’s something about awful people on reality TV shows that are there to make the home viewer feel better about themselves.
Anything stand out?
I will say, this show has a knack for finding people at their worst. Now, as most people who’ve gotten married will tell you, a wedding is a very stressful time, and people can overreact. Bridezillas seemed to find women at their absolute worst, doing things that we’d all like to think we wouldn’t, often coming across as moody, spoiler brats that make you wonder why anyone was willing to marry them at all.
And sometimes it was outright funny. A bride who insisted that her bridal party slim down before the wedding (though she herself was hardly slim and saw no problem with her own weight) tried to take her friends out for forced exercise. At the first opportunity, the women all took off for the nearest buffet, leaving the bride behind, shouting for them to return. To add insult to injury, the groom showed up and, seeming not to know what was going on, gave the women a ride to the buffet.
There’s a decent chance the whole thing was at least partially staged, but who cares?
And at least once the show featured a groom misbehaving while his bride-to-be was the good one.
Add a overly sweet-voiced narrator explaining why the bride was an awful person, and you had decent, mindless fun.
Any downsides?
Don’t question things too much, or else you’ll start to wonder how they found these women to begin with. Presumably, they all contacted the show and said they were awful people who should be on the air. They also signed consent forms. So did their fiances. And their families. Anyone whose face wasn’t blurred off. My wife thinks the show helped the women pay for their respective weddings, which is the only explanation that makes any sense as to why anyone would want to be put on national television this way.
There’s also the issue of the narrator. Sometimes the bride was having what would be a normal, natural reaction to what was happening, an instance where she would be right to be mad, but the narrator would still find a way to blame the woman for doing whatever she did. That just never seemed fair. Sometimes the bride had a legitimate complaint.
Gabbing Geek 