Rejections: The Real Wedding Crashers review

The Real Wedding Crashers
Regular Airtime: Mondays, 10 p.m. ET (NBC)
US Release date: 23 April 2007
By James A. Brown
F

Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
- Fred Allen

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures

Ten years ago, in the last throws of Seinfeld, this would have been unthinkable. Even just five years ago, in the halcyon days of super-sized Friends episodes and an aging Frasier this would have been a stretch. But there they were on The Today Show, the producers of NBC’s new Reality/Comedy hybrid, The Real Wedding Crashers. Boy network TV has changed.

If there’s any axiom that holds true about network television, its that evolution only comes from desperation. And NBC is desperate. The Peacock network’s ratings woes have been no secret. NBC has been on a downward spiral over the last decade and the current drought in seems like the culprit. This drought has hurt NBC like no other network and has dropped them to fourth place. So in a sign of desperation, the network of Cheers and Cosby has turned Ashton Kutcher, and a one note Owen Wilson movie.

Unlike Survivor, American Idol, and Dancing with the Stars, Crashers’ premise is something out of Bravo’s rejection heap. In its premiere, we’re introduced to Jonnie and Derek, an engaged couple who have decided to have their wedding “crashed” unbeknownst to the rest of their family and friends. The crashers are a band of improv comics and actors that take positions such as the wedding planner, waiters, and the minister. The show centers around a narrator named Gareth who specializes in sniping smarmy sarcastic snide lines, straining for laughs. He also plays a rude waiter who eats off the plates of the guests.

Gareth is the tour guide for this grand con. While the wedding day unfolds, he leads the viewer through a Lost-like labyrinth of flashbacks from the previous three days. Each episode is split between the ceremony, the previous days’ setups and bride and groom’s commentary. The gags are pretty standard. The church was being fumigated just days before the wedding, the priest’s cell phone went off during the vows, the wedding planner Kat is incompetent, the best man and the groom were nearly arrested for possessing Cuban cigars and of course the cake is ruined.

Crashers grew more and more predicable as Gareth constantly foreshadowed every potentially funny moment as if he was from the Stuart Scott school of narration. The self centered nature of the narration was distracting, insufferable and begins to wear before the second commercial break, and gets worse from there. But Gareth was least of the problems; its greater issues are systemic.

The show suffers from equally irritating debilitating disorders which will likely lead to this show’s failure; it has a weak concept and is poorly executed.

Despite notable exceptions like this years NBC drama Friday Night Lights and the classic series M*A*S*H, it’s normally a bad idea to turn a film into a television series, let alone breeding the concept with an MTV reality show. So Crashers was at a deficit from its inception. But its execution exasperates the flaws in its premise. Chief among those is the greatest crime any comedy can commit: lack of funny.

Unlike Kutcher’s previous concoction Punk’d, Crashers drags. Punk’d was by no means a brilliant comedy, but each episode was a lighting quick sugar rush, much like Candid Camera. Punk’d had simple gags that felt spontaneous and lasted just long enough for a viewer to sympathize with each mark before the gag was over. The Real Wedding Crashers is laboring, clumsy, boring and about forty minutes too long.

Another missing ingredient was caring about the marks. Punk’d was successful because it picked on celebrities. Candid Camera worked because it picked on everyone. In each case there’s a universal, albeit loose, connection between the viewer and those being picked on. Crashers creates no such connection. The only people we get know in the hour are the Bride, the Groom and the narrator, and all three know what’s going on. So when a waiter takes a crab cake off a random guest’s plate, I found myself shrugging my shoulders and wondering why should I care? I also felt awful.

With all this said, it doesn’t seem like stretch to think The Real Wedding Crashers won’t isn’t the answer to NBC’s comedy conundrum. It’s a chance you take in desperate times. Desperate maneuvers provide the room for creative evolution but those same maneuvers can be self destructive like New Coke or the Friends spin-off Joey. This is certainly the case with comedy/reality concept.  The genre is stillborn, has failed repeatedly, and seems to get worse with every attempt. And with half baked results like Crashers, maybe this idea should be thrown on the scrap heap of TV history, next to UPN’s Home-boys in Outer Space and whatever David Spade is working on next.