Review – Four Weddings
Four Weddings – Seven – 7:30pm Wednesday – AUS
If you’ve seen the promos for Channel 7’s new reality offering you’ll have a fair idea what to expect. Four Weddings takes four brides and pits them against each other in a battle to see who has the best wedding. As the brides show off their weddings bitchiness ensues and tacky excess will rule the day. Unfortunately for Four Weddings the show that they wanted to make isn’t exactly the one they end up with.
Four Weddings was obviously pitched as ‘Come Dine With Me but with weddings!’ And its premise is deceptively simple, yet it doesn’t quite hit the mark. The producers who thought up this project knew that they’re big selling point would be ‘bitchiness’. They knew that if they gathered a group of brides-to-be in a room together and made them judge each other’s weddings the claws would come out. Their entire mindset is that ‘bitchiness = good TV’. What Four Weddings wasn’t really counting on was that if you force four reasonable women spend time together, they will probably get along and all of that bitchiness that you had hoped would spring forth may be a little harder to find.
The first episode featured Sothy (who doesn’t dance!), Tracey (who’s into sci-fi!), Allana (who’s a princess!) and Chez (who’s a bit ditzy!) and their respective weddings. As the women experience each other’s weddings there are complaints but they’re such nothing complaints that it feels like the contestants were prompted several times by producers before they could come up with something even remotely resembling a bitchy comment. Sothy complains that the steak at Chez’s wedding had a chewy bit in it! Oh no! Allana points out that she was cold at Tracey’s outdoor wedding! Oh my! Sothy even complains that Allana’s ceremony was ‘tedious’. To which host Fifi Box says “Oh, Sothy! Brutal!” – Really? Brutal? If Fifi thinks something being called tedious is brutal, she’s not going to be happy with this review.
There is a neat kernel of an idea for a show here. Everybody has gone to a wedding, and everybody has bitched about something at a wedding, but does that necessarily make good television? It really depends on how far you go with it. If Four Weddings went balls to the wall trashy and cruel than it could sneak into that ‘so bad it’s good’ category, but it doesn’t. It’s quite clear that these four women don’t actually mind each other’s company as they all joke around, or tease Sothy for not dancing, or have a group photo in the photo booth.
The show could have gone the other way; it could have leant into a nicer, friendlier, funnier show. The Farmer Wants A Wife has done very well for itself running down this route, and while bitchiness wouldn’t be out of order it would be nice if the show recognized the fact that these women could enjoy each other’s weddings AS WELL AS gripe about some aspects of it. Instead the show insists on saying things like “the girls put rivalry aside” – what rivalry? There has been no evidence of rivalry.
Four Weddings is a reality series with an identity crisis. The person who pitched this show knew what they wanted – bitching. Channel 7, who put this on their schedule, knew what they wanted – bitching. The editors were given a clear goal when asked to cut together the footage – find the bitching at all costs. The marketing department knew what they were trying to sell – bitching. The only problem is that the show forgot to tell the women, and while they may have complained that their feet got wet in cold grass, it was obvious that there wasn’t as much bitching as the TV people were hoping for. This isn’t to say that every week the four women involved are going to fail to deliver the vile the promos hope for. If this first episode is anything to go by though, Four Weddings isn’t the show that it hopes to be, and it doesn’t seem to want to take the risk to become the show it could be – which is a reality TV take on the real experience of going to a wedding; sure you may bitch about some things but you’re not all harpy divas out for revenge, you’re there because you’re fond of the bride and groom and the occasional bitching is all just part of the fun.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad
