Fox's Bride Idea

By James Poniewozik

Look at it this way: people have got married in Las Vegas for dumber reasons. Probably with less knowledge of each other. Maybe with worse odds of their union's lasting. But whatever those drunk, impulsive legions have had to regret the next morning, they, unlike Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell, did not take the plunge in front of their families, a former Miss America and millions of TV viewers.

Marriage has been ratings gold before. Thank Tiny Tim, Luke and Laura, and, most of all, Chuck and Di for that. But it used to be that at least one partner needed to be famous. Fox upset that rule--and just may have found its answer to the ABC phenom Who Wants to Be a Millionaire--with the crass namesake and surprise smash Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? In the process, it underscored the new reality of TV's New Reality: oddball, cheap nonfiction programs, from game shows to voyeurism stunts, are elbowing aside sitcoms and dramas. And they may get even weirder.

Reading the ratings for the two-hour special, which climbed steadily from 10 million viewers the first half an hour through the electronic shivaree to nearly 23 million, you could almost hear the phones ringing across America Tuesday night as viewers uttered the eternal phrase "You will not freaking believe what's on Fox." Fifty women, running the gamut from merely attractive to damn!, chosen from more than 3,000, competed for the hand of a San Diego multimillionaire (barely; his fortune is estimated at $2 million) in what amounted to a beauty pageant minus the class and intellectual heft. There was a "beachwear contest," because, host Jay Thomas rationalized, Mr. Moneybags wanted his lady love to be "as comfortable on the beach as he is." There was a "personality test," in which 10 semifinalists answered questions along the lines of how they'd spend his money and, by the way, would they mind if he went to strip clubs? There was Rockwell--picked from some 100 well-endowed lonelyhearts--watching from a high-tech perch (he should have been stroking a hairless cat), his face hidden until the end.

It ended with a bended-knee proposal and a civil ceremony under a giant floral arch that could have come from Godzilla's funeral. Friends, this is why God gave us eyesight. It was a gross spectacle in too many ways to name, degrading, if not to the 50 lovelies who showed up--who after all got a national TV debut with only a 2% chance of having to marry some desperate Croesus--then to every other woman who chooses a mate. (Not to mention men: try pitching a special called Who Wants to Marry a Sweet Guy with a Decent Job?) And it was genius: an irresistible tour of our baser natures that left us dying for the sequel.

Not to mention curious about just what kind of life awaited the insta-couple. They spent last week celebrating (or having the dry heaves) on a Caribbean cruise. Did Conger change her name? Did they play shuffleboard? Have they got to second base? (Before or after they learned each other's middle name?) Unfortunately, they're not taking calls from the press--though, interestingly, they have separate rooms. "There was a whirlwind for 24 hours, and then reality set in," says Mike Darnell, Fox executive vice president of special programming. "They're taking a step back and taking it very slow." As you'd guess, folks who get hitched on Fox to complete strangers guard their privacy jealously.

But we do know that Conger, an emergency-room nurse, walked away with more than $100,000 in loot, including an Isuzu Trooper and a $35,000, three-carat diamond ring. It's a nice nest egg to have since she, like the 49 other women, signed a standard prenuptial agreement that protects Rockwell's wealth in case of divorce. Semifinalist Julie Gardner says she believes Conger really did want to get married. Not so Gardner. A devout Christian from Los Angeles, she signed up for the excitement--after "walk[ing] around in a bathing suit on national television, I can meet any challenge with confidence"--but was "grateful" not to be picked. One semifinalist put it more bluntly: "I was in a panic. All I wanted was to go home and be with my friends. Suddenly I was up there, and the reality was looming. I was shaking. It wasn't until that moment that it occurred to me--'I don't want this, I don't want this.'"

Marry is the brainchild of Fox's Darnell, the man behind When Animals Attack--precisely the sort of crass reality program Fox was pledging to cut back on earlier this season. The brainstorm hit him at a cousin's wedding last summer, just as Millionaire was breaking out. "I realized what was driving the show was wish fulfillment," says Darnell. "People dream and wish about finding love."

As retrograde as the prime-time cattle call was, there was something very 21st century about the idiosyncratic, mediagenic couple it produced. What kind of multimillionaire did Fox find? Not an investment banker, not a CEO, but a smooth-talking corporate motivational speaker who once worked as a stand-up comedian and had a bit part in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (Rockwell, 42, made his money in real estate.) "He was not the richest guy, but he was the most sincere about really wanting to find a woman and start a life with her," says Mike Fleiss, president of Next Entertainment, which produced the show. And he chose for his bride not a twentysomething Pilates instructor with a Baywatch rack but a 34-year-old Gulf War vet with buff arms who spoke with the sangfroid and stage presence of Elizabeth Dole.

Then again, she also said she wouldn't have lunch with a male friend if it would make Hubby Warbucks jealous, since "that's my husband and we have a life together." Certainly no one should be blase about the show's message. A vast female audience--a third of all the women between 18 and 34 watching TV at the time--tuned in, and God help them and their potential mates if they saw it as a fairy tale.

But it's simplistic to say that when TV shows bad behavior, it induces bad behavior among the audience. The very reason people were transfixed, calling one another, posting on the Internet and talking about it at the office, was that it was so ludicrous. If it hadn't been, the show would have tanked. It was less an advertisement for the way marriage should be than a strong, if inadvertent indictment of how marriage often has been. If Marry essentially said marriage can be a kind of prostitution, then it echoed an age-old radical-feminist critique. Try as Fox might to package it as romance, it was really an irresistibly audacious object lesson--a chance to watch someone do something we wouldn't do for a multimillion bucks.

And we'll have plenty more chances to see that. Expect Marry to return, not as a series but perhaps for one or two encores. Darnell says the next one may feature 50 men competing to marry a rich woman. (Yeah, they probably just flipped a coin to see which gender sported the swimwear this time.) And on the way is a whole crop of unusual reality programs, the mutant children of Millionaire, which are not just hot but cheap.

This summer two voyeur-TV programs will air on, appropriately, the Eye, CBS. Survivor, a remake of a Swedish show, will strand a group of contestants on a tropical island to struggle to survive (and win a million dollars). Big Brother, an adaptation of a Dutch show, will, like MTV's The Real World, sequester people in a camera-filled house (also to compete for a prize). The network paid $20 million for rights to the program, which will air over 100 nights, five nights a week. The show, like Millionaire, was a smash overseas, drawing more than half of all Dutch viewers for its finale last year. While some Europeans slammed both shows as cruel, CBS television president Leslie Moonves defended them as human dramas. "A couple fell in love [on the Dutch Big Brother]," he said. "Drama isn't only unhappy."

Making the Band, a behind-the-scenes look at O-Town, a real pop boy band, custom-cast by Lou Pearlman, the impresario behind the Backstreet Boys, will be launched by ABC on March 24. Produced by the makers of The Real World, Making will track the Orlando group's rehearsals, struggles for success and, of course, love lives. "Those five boys on a bus, the temptations of the road, anything can happen," says Pearlman, grinning. Even PBS will air The 1900 House, in which a British family spends a year living amid year 1900 technology. (See them shave with a straight razor! Watch them brush their teeth with salt!) And there are plenty more Eurovoyeur shows for the taking: the BBC's Castaway 2000 strands 36 Britons on a remote Scottish isle, while The Bus (from the parent of Big Brother) sets its cast to cohabit on--You got it.

However well this programming pays off, it could backfire. By bringing cheap reality into prime time, the networks are programming themselves like cable channels. "A show like [Marry] is extremely dangerous to the prime-time sitcom and drama business," says agent Jay Sures of United Talent Agency. "It is extremely cheap, can be put together very quickly and doesn't require talent or writers." Yet one of the networks' greatest fears has been that viewers would increasingly fail to distinguish between them and cable competitors, making their venerable brands less valuable. Could the networks be eroding their distinctive edge? "Absolutely," concedes Fox television chair Sandy Grushow. "The danger is in giving away too much of your shelf space to platforms that could be found on cable and the Internet." Then again, if the networks don't marry off strangers, somebody else will; the upcoming syndicated series Wed at First Sight will match and hitch couples in a single day.

Maybe they're on to something. Maybe Darva and Rick have discovered just the ticket for an era of time deficits, vicarious living and human isolation--a time when a Pennsylvania man is offering a $25,000 bounty on his website for whoever finds him a bride. A match made in Vegas, sanctioned by media, with a love that gives the gift of ratings. Darva, Rick, you may not be the future of American marriage, but for the moment, you are the future of American TV.

So, congrats. And if you crazy kids are reading this, somewhere away from the cameras, here's a romantic game for you to play. Pull your spouse close. Ask your new love to close his or her eyes.

Tell us: What color are they?

--With reporting by Brad Liston/Orlando and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Brad Liston/Orlando and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles