TNT's "Wedding Day," which premieres tonight, is a show aimed straight for the heart strings by way of the tear ducts, but it may stir up as much anger as joy.
Following the blueprint of the failed "Extreme Makeover: Wedding Edition," the producers of "Wedding Day" select a deserving couple who cannot afford their dream wedding and, with the help of devoted family and friends, give it to them. (Or as close to it as those sponsors donating goods and services will allow.)
If there is a certain product-placement quease-factor -- the shots of Chandon, the rehearsal dinner speech by a sponsor's rep -- "Wedding Day" is still a welcome antidote to shows like "The Bachelor/Bachelorette," "Hitched or Ditched" and "Bridezillas" in which heterosexual marriage is used as either a game-show prize or backdrop for peevishly bad behavior.
But in this time of national marital discord, with the very definition of the institution under perpetual debate and revision, no wedding is just a wedding. At least not on television.
"Wedding Day's" celebration of the Big Day seems strangely political in its timing. Especially in California, where just last summer the news was filled with the images of thousands of gay and lesbian couples ecstatically taking their vows, an option subsequently denied others by the passage of Proposition 8.
Unlike so many other couple-based reality shows -- "Wife Swap" comes to mind, as does more recently, "Jon & Kate Plus 8" -- "Wedding Day" takes marriage, the ritual and the institution, seriously. Very seriously.
Although it is essentially a "Queen for a Day" battle of pathos, with the couples sending "audition" tapes to prove that they are worthy enough to receive a bunch of really good free stuff, one of the requirements seems to be that all the participants understand that a wedding is more than a fancy event. It is a milestone, a moment in which two people become something more, a metamorphosis that requires the aid of a community.
This idea turns "Wedding Day," intentionally or not, into a big satin and sequin raspberry to those who can't legally enter into the state of matrimony and undercuts those who argue that civil unions allow gays and lesbians the same legal rights as marriage. Can you imagine a show titled "Civil Union Day?"
