Most of the potentially laugh-inducing moments surrounding a wedding do not occur on the actual wedding day. The trivial crises of last-minute food changes and seating chart swapping (and, for ‘Big Day,’ the blinding of the groom’s best friend) may pass as fleetingly funny inside-jokes to those involved, but are certainly not enough to provide the comedic material for a series that simply depicts the single day. Real-time television, as in the case of ‘24,’ does not necessarily translate to true-to-life content, though it should exude a distinct edginess and urgency missing from real-time ‘Big Day.’ The only saving grace of the hokey concept is the helpful timestamps flashed before and after commercial breaks. That is, the creators have fulfilled the nagging desire to look at your watch and count down the remaining minutes of the show for you.
For a soon-to-be (ten hours, to be exact) bride, Alice (Marla Sokoloff) is unusually clueless, and not in an endearingly amusing way. Danny, her fiancé, is so immature that you couldn’t even call his behavior regression because, well, he never actually left childhood. There isn’t even a semblance to chemistry between the characters (or the actors) who, together, become an exasperatingly implausible match with equally annoying relatives and friends. Alice’s father (Kurt Fuller) couldn’t be any more right when he tries to talk his daughter out of marrying Josh, but his incomprehensible dialogue precludes us from taking even him, the supposed voice of reason, seriously.
Wendie Malick’s Jane is the only character who wears the frenzy of wedding day inconsequentiality well and even she has trouble describing why Alice should marry Josh. This is a question, blatantly skirted by ‘Big Day,’ which a series centered on a wedding day should have clearly answered within its pilot. Watching a poorly matched man and woman waste ten hours of their lives getting married is an even bigger waste of time for the viewers. ABC can save some paper and forgo a prenuptial agreement because it doesn’t look like anybody’s going to even see an aisle to walk down here.
