Wedding Bells Rings in the Laughs

Wedding Bells Rings in the Laughs by Roxanne McDonald

With stellar scenes, superb acting, tight dialogue, and a passel of relevant, relatable, reliable, understated hilarity, David E. Kelley has done it again.

“The Wedding Bells” is the smartest and funniest show to come along in a long, long time. I’m tempted to say not since Seinfeld but will settle with suggesting that not since “Boston Legal,” “Scrubs”, “King of Queens,” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” and then with “Extras” and “The Sarah Silverman Show,” et. al., of course, has such an immaculate and seamless comedy made us laugh out loud–even when we are alone in the room with just the TV (and, thank God, no laugh track).

First, there is great character development—already instantly establishing sympathetic characters by the time the sixty minutes are over: there’s hyper-sexed Sammy Bell (Sarah Jones), who is first seen lining up the groomsmen, asking who wants to bed her, and who then appears with “post-coital hair” from having slept with a member of the wedding party…the groom.

There’s the stoic but subtly sassy Jane Bell (Teri Polo), who appears to be the main protagonist/tragic heroine type upon whose shoulders the debacles will fall and for whom the responsibility of remedying will be.

There’s Jane’s husband, Russell Hawkins (Benjamin King), who will demand a kind of attention that is nagging but endearing at once. With his attraction to opposite sexes discussion, for example, wherein he starts quietly but ends up ranting how “with men it’s chemical; with women it’s cognitive,” takes his fear on an absurd and therefore hilarious slippery slope of paranoid reasoning….

For then there’s Ernesto, the smarmy chef who is Greek but feigns this Italian personage that is less endearing than it is ridiculous.

There’s Annie Bell (Kadee Strickland), who is the dark-haired and prone to brooding sister type, who brings seriousness to her job that has gotta make her crack sometime.

And if a comedy can logically have a comic relief (and I suggest it can, if it is, as “The Wedding Bells” is, a many-layered comedy), there is one of the most severe, tendentious characters, Debbie Quill (Sheree Shepard). Debbie has that tight, almost staccato speaking style—of a comedienne who is so serious, so sober in her assertions that you have to crack up to relieve the pressure of her mad matriarchal lectures:

In one scene, after she has confirmed the importance of the wedding day for the bride (and has thus established the significance of the show’s premise), saying how deflecting from the bride should “never never happen cause its their special special time; each should feel like the only bride on the planet cause it’s her special special time…,” Debbie spots the incoming twins:

“Get your Doublemint twin selves up against the wall. This is Amanda’s wedding week. Now don’t you go around showin’ your cleavage; giving people advice; talking about your matching tourniquets….”

“What? What’s wrong?” she asks.
“[It’s just that] we’re totally afraid of black people.”
“It’s totally cultural.”
“OhmyGod, totally.”

And Amanda (Missi Pyle) Pontell, besides the Wedding Singer Man (Ralph Snow) who is a darling, introspective, suffering and yet buffering minor character I hope we see more of, is one well-wrought bride character—uptight, undersexed, and smelling to high heaven with her sense of general and specific entitlement, general because she’s rich and specific because this is her wedding week and no Wedding Singer Man, Food Prep Person, or Photography Man is going to get away with anything less than total obsequious subservience. It will be a shame to lose such unique and complimentary characters once they get married, though…unless Kelley will figure ways to keep them in the picture.

But as is also remarkably right for a female-character-driven comedy which is nicely balanced with “supporting” males, the show has a sex symbol—in that very photographer, David Conlon (Michael Landes). David is not only a wedding photog who just shows up between ten and two, however. He is there as a kind of PR man, a placator, a pacifier. He is there to convince or discourage or support, talking the bride-to-be into mending ways with the wedding singer or talking her out of her stress over not being sexy enough and therefore out of parts of her wedding dress, as he shoots private photos of her with a sleeve down, dress hiked up, as pounding feral music plays on a boom box in the bridal dressing room.

And as that music is juxtaposed with the waiting guests and altar and aisle and all, outside where the sweet and sexless violins play pre-wedding pretties.

David is a kind of Joshua Jackson sexy, and his lines suggest he has this rescuer “what-a-mayun” firmness that only the finest amounts of testosterone can get away with as he directs and commands the most frigid of female brides (and as he will likely bring commanding ways to other women in the series as we go, including his ex-, Annie?).

Kelley’s overall composition is tight. The first episode has offered evidence of that (even if you haven’t seen “Boston Legal” or “Alley McBeal” or any other of the many brilliant works). For instance, in this first installment, the contiguous concept is in the all-too-familiar song, “I Will Survive.” Ralph Snow, the wedding singer (Chris Williams), is heard at the start to say how he will die/whathaveyou if he has to play “I Will Survive” one more time.

In a scene a few minutes later, he and Jane are having a drink at the bar. He expresses his disdain again, they talk about the falling out he had with Amanda, and how her comment about him being just a wedding singer and all has hurt. He tells Jane she doesn’t know suffering, loss, pain…. She says she does, says she had a true love once she hurt badly over when she lost. “At first I was afraid…,” she tells Ralph, “I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without him by my side….” Smiles. He gets it. We get it.

In the final scene, Delta Burke as Amanda’s equally privileged and demanding mother calls Ralph away from the stage and insists he play—you got it—“I Will Survive.” He insists he doesn’t know that song, and she insists he does, saying how Jane (look over at Jane smiling and waving a quick “ha” wave) told her he did.

Great fun. Great, compelling comedy that this viewer can’t wait to see more of. In the words of the comic book guy on “The Simpsons,” best. new. show. ever. Or, well, at least in a long, long time.

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