Celebrities: They’re just like us, except they get to arbitrate our marriages

NBC kicked off its new, post-The Jay Leno Show programming last night by interrupting the closing Olympic ceremonies for Jerry Seinfeld’s new show The Marriage Ref.

Tom Papa, host of The Marriage Ref

I’m going to have to go ahead and out myself right now as previously holding out some hope that The Marriage Ref could be funny. The concept, at its most stripped down and simple, is actually sort of interesting. Real life couples re-live some knockdown drag-out fight, and then a panel of celebrity guests weigh in on who’s right. Inevitably in the course of discussing the couple, the celebrities reveal something about themselves and their own marital experiences, hidden inside the chortling and wink-winking. It combines the voyeuristic impulses of shows like Wife Swap and SuperNanny with our culture-wide fascination in repeating the “celebrities are just like us!” revelation over and over again. There’s also a pleasantly optimistic undercurrent to the whole thing, at least in theory – these fights are awful, repetitive, and silly, but they’re not going to be the end of this marriage.

In practice, it turns out, The Marriage Ref is just terrible. The worst part of it all is the sports-themed framework, which attempts to box everything up into stupid, pre-packaged sporty segments like “The Call” and “The Play of the Day.” None of the sports metaphors aid the discussion, and instead, most interrupt the already stilted conversational flow. Natalie Morales’ “Just the Facts, Ma’am” is the most absurd of these, a pre-written bit where the host Tom Papa interrupts the celebrities to ask Natalie for more information on a certain topic, and then she reads out some statistics that are supposed to help the audience better understand a situation. The first couple’s fight is about a husband who wants to stuff and display his dead dog. Natalie informs us that about 1,000 Americans do this every year. No one knows what to say. Tom Papa is also a serious contributor to the show’s herky-jerky quality – Alec Baldwin is a pretty funny guy, so when Tom Papa interrupts him to give us a silly, mindless, clearly rehearsed bit, he comes off as a little kid being a pest at the grown-up table. “Hey, look at me! Look at me look at me look look look at meeeeeee!!” *Sticks a chopstick in his nose.*

Jerry Seinfeld is not laughing with you, sir. He is laughing at you.

Aside from these problems with the show’s execution, it’s clear there’s also a deep flaw in the concept of The Marriage Ref that I hadn’t really appreciated until seeing it. The entire idea here is that we, normal Americans, are offering ourselves up so that celebrities can judge us. While my initial impulse was that coming together to talk about marriage could have a humanizing effect on the celebrity panel, the reverse is actually true. The concept of the show relies on the inherent acceptance that celebrities are so much better than the normal couples that they can arbitrate their marriages based on a two-minute-long clip. And we will accept that judgment, because OMG Madonna! If The Marriage Ref is really sports-themed, then the couples are not really the opposing teams – the couple is the poor ping-pong ball that’s been offered up for the amusement of the celebrities to bat around and then discard. What could be more humiliating?

It’ll be interesting to see how the show performs, and whether the swift and terrible critical response seeps into popular perception. Right now it looks like NBC is going to have to find another lifeboat.