‘The Bachelor’ review: Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici’s wedding unintentionally great
If you love celebrating weddings, wedding dress shopping, or Jesus, then odds are, you probably loved “The Bachelor: Sean and Catherine’s Wedding” on Sunday night. This was a big event for ABC: They kept everything under wraps, and took a big risk making the entire thing live. That is something that, from a technical perspective, has to be admired.
Now we turn to actually looking at this as a form of entertainment. This two hours (!) was a giant hot mess from start to finish, and just stuffed full of unintentional comedy for so many reasons.
1. The “spontaneous” segments – Rather than giving us some obviously-scripted montages of Sean and Catherine preparing for the wedding, which come across so fake, why not focus more on interviewing the wedding guests? We’d be much more interested in funny stories, or seeing more or Arie Luyendyk Jr. or Jef Holm gossiping about if Emily Maynard will show up!
2. Forcing things upon us again and again and again – We get it: It is VERY fascinating apparently that Sean and Catherine have not had sex before marriage. But how many times do we need to see it? Why is there a camera in the honeymoon suite? Are we only supposed to enjoy this special while in the midst of heavy drinking?
3. The constant advertising – We learned right away where Sean and Catherine’s wedding was being held. If you are going to advertise so much that you are in Santa Barbara, then give us a James Roday cameo! There’s nothing better than having a fake character from a show about a fake detective that doesn’t even really film in Santa Barbara show up. (We kid because “Psych” is one of the only bits of relevant trivia that we know about the region, save for that it’s gorgeous.)
Okay, so once we got through most of the nonsense, there were two people who were obviously deeply in love with each other, and managed to find each other despite this crazy reality TV world around them. Sean’s family also seems to be very nice. It takes strong people to survive through everything that the tabloids and the industry puts you through, so hats off to that. We don’t blame the two for getting married on TV, mostly because it’s a free ceremony that you get to keep with you forever in high definition.
Does this sweetness make up for the first hour? Hardly. As a great home movie for Sean and Catherine, this special works. For everyone else? You probably spent the first hour laughing ironically, and it probably took a few minutes to actually settle in when things got serious. Grade: C- as entertainment; for Sean and Catherine it’s probably an A.
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Photo: ABC