'The Marriage Ref,'
old-fashioned fun TV
Seinfeld's show recalls the game shows of yore
By Tom Conroy
Mar 4, 2010
Just when it seemed NBC had learned its lesson from the “Jay Leno Show” fiasco and was going to redeem its 10 p.m. time slot with worthy scripted shows like “Parenthood,” the network goes and fills the Thursday-night hour with “The Marriage Ref.”
What’s more surprising is that the new series, an unscripted whatchamacallit that looks even cheaper than the economical Leno show, is good TV.
Produced by Jerry Seinfeld, “The Marriage Ref” harks back to those old-school game shows like “To Tell the Truth” and “What’s My Line?” in which regular folks tried to win prizes but the main focus was on the celebrity panelists, who were expected to comment wittily on the proceedings.
In “The Marriage Ref,” married couples present their sides of a recurring argument in a remotely taped segment; then a panel of three famous people rule on who is right. The half-hour episode airing Sunday night after the closing ceremony of the Olympics (NBC hasn’t released any other episodes for review) was a diverting way to waste a half hour, with the three celebrities — Alec Baldwin, Kelly Ripa and Seinfeld himself — providing sufficient star power and laughs.
Wisely, “The Marriage Ref” isn’t pretending to have any real-world therapeutic value and is steering away from serious marital disputes. The two conflicts in Sunday’s show were inherently amusing disagreements over whether one husband could keep his dead dog’s stuffed body in the house and whether the other husband could install a stripper pole in the bedroom.
As often happens in nonscripted TV — one hesitates to call this “reality TV” — one of the noncelebrity participants was a little too ready for primetime. The dog-loving husband, a Long Islander named Kevin, had all his sound bites ready, delivering them in the character (one hopes) of a stereotyped Italian-American, right down to telling his wife to “shaddap.”
Fortunately, the second couple came across as more genuine. The husband kept telling the wife that the stripper pole would be a good form of exercise.
Mostly, though, the spotlight was on the celebrities. Baldwin, who every year is growing more comfortable in his skin, was particularly charming and funny, at one point offering Kevin a compromise about what to do with the dog: “Maybe you could make him into a bobble head and put him in the back window of the car.”
The host, a comedian named Tom Papa, was both unobtrusive and witty. At one point, he used a Telestrator to point out paraphernalia from various abandoned hobbies in Kevin’s attic. Later, he told Kevin that the dog would have to go in the “open-air attic of broken dreams.”
Both couples received the same prize, so there is little suspense. In both cases, the celebrity judges voted with the wives.
This outcome was predictable. In any successful marriage, both spouses know that the wife is always right.
|
|
|
