Television Collision: Great TV Weddings
Written by: Phoebe Raven, CC2K Staff Writer
If you’re a freelance TV columnist like me, nothing disrupts your life more than traveling, vacationing and attending family functions. You can’t keep up with your viewing schedule, you can’t keep up with your Twitter feed, you can’t sit down and write in your usual time slot and are destined to play catch-up for about a week after your return. This is precisely what happened to me as it was time for me to attend another wedding this Pentecost weekend. On the long drive to and from the festivities I thought about how real life weddings are always so different than the weddings we see on TV. There is less drama on the one hand (I have yet to attend a wedding at which the groom contemplates taking off five minutes before the ceremony) and more drama on the other hand (because you are witnessing actual people you care about confess their love, albeit usually in very short speeches).
Nevertheless, we all love us our TV weddings, the laughs, the drama, the tears, the sappy speeches and the big white dresses. So in no particular order, here are some of the TV weddings that were so memorable to me I could recount them on a drive through the countryside.
Donna & David, Beverly Hills, 90210
As a teenager I was obsessed with Beverly Hills, 90210. But when the gang left high school and Brenda moved to London, I didn’t watch as religiously as I used to anymore. Nevertheless, when it came time for the supersized series finale, in which David and Donna would finally get their happy end – after being rudely interrupted on their path to bliss by a very annoying Tiffani-Amber Thiessen – I had to tune in and watch the glory.
It was pompous, it was cheesy, but it was awesome. When you had been there from the beginning, when David was nothing more than a geeky nerd, who always wanted to fit in with the group, but most of them wouldn’t even give him the time of day – most notably Donna – and to then see what he had become, a good-looking, committed partner to a sometimes more than tedious woman like Donna with all her family hang-ups, it was quite heartwarming to hear him say how he couldn’t even remember a time, when he had not been in love with Donna.
I was especially happy about Dylan (Luke Perry) returning for the big finale, whose own wedding and subsequent loss of his wife in a drive-by shooting the next day, had broken my heart a few years prior. Yes, the Donna and David wedding was quite the happening and a perfect end to a show that defined an era.
Oh, just watch the sob fest for yourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yriCAdKIQ2w
Monica & Chandler, Friends
When thinking back to Friends a lot of people forget how long it actually took for Monica and Chandler to 1) become a couple and 2) actually get married. As soon as they got together, they were such a unifying center for the show that many people forgot there was a time when these two were both single and dating, with more (Monica dated Richard, i.e. Tom Selleck for almost two seasons) or less success (Chandler dated Kathy for six episodes and Janice on and off for an episode each season).
It wasn’t until the Season 4 finale that Chandler and Monica hooked up in London (at Ross’ disaster of a wedding to British Bitch Emily), it wasn’t until the middle of Season 5 that everyone found out about them being a couple and it took until the Season 7 finale until we finally got to see Monica and Chandler walk down the aisle.
Of course Chandler had the mandatory pre-wedding freak out, which was to be expected from a guy whose fear of commitment was as established as Ross’ love for divorce. But this old storyline was given a nice twist, because it turned out Chandler wasn’t really freaking out about the wedding, he thought Monica was pregnant (as did everybody else, thanks to annoying Rachel dumping her positive test in Monica’s trash) and he was just worried about becoming a dad. But even that couldn’t stop him from marrying the woman he loved.
Joey was officiating the wedding, and even though I had been looking forward to him wearing “multi-colored robes”, as he had promised a few episodes prior, he showed up in a blood-stained costume from a WWII movie he was shooting at the time and forgot half his lines in the wedding, such as asking for the rings.
Yes, it was a hilarious wedding and heartwarming at the same time, although I think I might like the proposal even more than the actual wedding, because Chandler is one of my all-time favorite TV characters anyway, a better, warmer heart you could not find and it shows so much during the proposal.
So, please enjoy Monica trying to propose to Chandler and understand why there is a reason that girls don’t do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nczQiEHcrWs
Lily & Marshall, How I Met Your Mother
Similar to Friends, this show also started out with the central couple not married, although they had been a couple forever. At the end of Season 1 Lily and Marshall took a short break from their relationship, but it only served to delay the inevitable wedding for another season, and by the second season finale, they got hitched.
Much like the hundred of sitcom weddings before HIMYM, Lily and Marshall’s wedding seemed destined to be a disaster, from Marshall shaving his head in a panic to Lily’s ex-boyfriend Scooter showing up, one obstacle followed another until we finally got the perfect wedding before the wedding. Barney recently got licensed to marry people (are we stealing from Friends here? The whole show is, so yes) and so he marries Lily and Marshall in the park before the actual huge ceremony, just like they always wanted, in the circle of only their closest friends. That way, the big hoopla afterwards is just for fun and all the pressure is off.
If only we all had friends like that!
Kevin & Scotty, Brothers & Sisters
I had long given up Brothers & Sisters, it got too soapy and I just can’t stand Calista Flockhart, but I tuned in for the one wedding I always wanted to see on that show and I wasn’t disappointed. Again, we didn’t have a minister officiate (are we sensing a theme here?), but it was Kevin’s sister Kitty who married her brother Kevin off to a wonderful man, who had stood by him through a lot of testing times.
I always liked how normal and unaffected the gay relationship on Brothers & Sisters was handled and the wedding was no exception, groundbreaking in its simplicity while dealing with such a hot-button topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6GRh1p3TTI