The Dark Reality TV Show I Still Think About
On death, narrative, and weddings
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The bulk of Shakespeare’s works can be filed under two categories. There are comedies, which end in weddings, and there are tragedies, which end in funerals. Imagine what his decrepit Elizabethan corpse would say if we dug it up, reanimated it, and informed him that, in the some 400 years since his death, our narrative technologies have advanced such that we’re now able to achieve (albeit accidentally) what was once considered impossible: a tragedy that ends in a wedding.
Marriage or Mortgage, an ill-fated Netflix show that I think about semi-regularly, aired in 2021, then didn’t air again. Set in Nashville, its premise is eminently guessable from the title: a couple is selected at random from the peasantry and asked to choose between spending their meager savings on a down payment for a house, or on the wedding of their working-class dreams. The money in question is not provided to them. It’s a show about people cracking open a nest egg. Having a significant amount of cash in a savings account and then spending it is enough of a fantasy in contemporary life that it makes for suitable escapist entertainment.
But that’s not all! There’s also a competition aspect to Marriage or Mortgage (MoM). Each episode sees wedding planner Sarah Miller (relentlessly cheerful) and real estate agent Nichole Holmes (yassified Elizabeth Warren) meeting with the couple and vying for their business. Sarah attempts to lure them down the aisle while Nichole tries to brute-force them into a recently renovated foyer. The two redheads pursue victory through deal sweeteners such as a complimentary wedding veil or discounted appliances, as well as through acts of emotional terrorism, of which I will provide some examples later.
The format goes: Sarah shows the couple a few wedding venues and a food truck, then Nichole shows them three mostly normal houses, and the couple makes their big choice. Either way, champagne is popped in the “Marriage or Mortgage Office,” because HQ had to be somewhere, and we all say “yay” for these two lucky Americans who have just enough money to experience once bog-standard facts of life like home ownership and weddings on an à la carte basis. Only, in their case, they’ve received a sweet assist from a streaming company that’s agreed to comp some of the cocktails. It’s a wonderful life.
You’ve doubtlessly already identified a flaw in the show’s formula, which is that choosing “a massive one-day party” over “a house” is not only crazy, but also, and even worse in the context of reality TV, unsympathetic. It’s the sort of decision that makes you want to leap through the screen, grab someone by the shoulders, and ask them what’s wrong with them. This is a feeling that reality TV often espouses intentionally, but what makes it fraught for MoM is that it troubles the catharsis. We’re meant to be happy for the couple at the end of the episode. This is a tall order after watching them choose a ranch dressing fountain over a two-story 3 BR / 2.5 BA with a spacious backyard, yet the show fully expects it of us.
Still, MoM remains a viable, if forgettable hate-watch. The kind that, when one happily discovers that another soul on this earth has also seen it, prompts one to say, Oh my God, that show pissed me off! There are plenty of shows like this. Yes, the premise could be considered “dystopian,” but that’s a tired observation about reality television. Ever since we successfully made being broke a spectator sport, we’ve pioneered many subgenres of entertainment that all basically amount to bobbing a $100 bill on a string over a desperate population and telling them to do a flip for it. In comparison to other reality TV shows out there, MoM barely registers on the “Tyra Banks Scale,” clocking in at a measly T1 (measured, as with tornadoes, by damage inflicted).
But if that was all there was to it, if MoM were merely “dark” in the way that reality TV as a whole is “dark,” I wouldn’t be writing this. It’s a relief to be writing this, by the way. I’ve wondered for years now why this show, which is basically indistinguishable from the rest of the nutritionless slurry pumped directly from the Netflix orifice, has set up a “Marriage or Mortgage Office” in my hippocampus. Now that I’ve worked it all out, I’ve come to see MoM as one of the more terrifying things I’ve watched. This has nothing to do with Sarah or Nichole, both of whom I find svelte and effective, like birds of prey, nor has it anything to do with the couples, most of whom are the sort of generic kooks endemic to the genre. It’s because MoM captured something on camera that I can’t forget: Death itself.
