The Perfect Bride

Anyone who would like to understand how the Lebanese always excel in vague doublespeak and procedural fogginess should watch the latest TV show on LBC: The Perfect Bride. The purpose of the show is simple: to find the perfect bride. The rest of the show, however, is ambiguous beyond compare.

As far as anyone can understand the concept, it would be to have mothers selecting the perfect bride for their sons in a Big Brother setting: all sons plus their mothers and the potential brides are locked up in a house with cameras everywhere. Too bad this is the Middle East, so the boys are separate from the girls with a huge wall through which the boys and girls can talk with each other. Anyway, to rule out the chance of steamy premarital activities even further, remember we still have the mothers-in-law to keep things in check:-)

Through a completely unfathomable selecting process, candidates are eliminated every week, hopefully leading to a dream marriage at the end of the season. It’s a nice, as in ‘seriously tasteless’, concept alright and it could easily work. However, the basic element of a competition is to have candidates wanting to win. But strangely enough, none of them seem to take the show serious.

For instance, the show has a segment during which one candidate can ask questions to another candidate of choice. Now, you would think this is intended to get to know your future partner a bit better, right?

Think again: One of the girls (A) was actually asking another girl (B) why she always hangs out with girl C, while she always told A how much she hated C. So now girl B had to defend herself against accusations of not being loyal. For a moment I thought “What a cool show, they also allow lesbian couples in”, but alas, it was just typical girl bickering. Clearly, girl A should have used her time to ask questions to the guys she likes the most. Then again, why would this be so important since she can also chat with them through the wall…sigh…

Other segments are equally illogical. Like, a potential couple has to do the matching test by answering questions about each other without the other hearing the answer. If both of them give the same answer, they score points. Sounds like a competition kinda thing, until you realize that nothing is being done with the scores. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you get zilch points or the maximum score.

What is also interesting to realize is that the guys stay in the house with their mothers all throughout the show, which lasts a whole season. How can they ever get so much time off from work, assuming they have a job? Or would they be in between jobs?

Also, would you really want to marry into a family where the mother, and/or the other family members, has no problems with being away from her husband and other kids for a couple months? Sounds rather dysfunctional if you ask me.

More and more during the show a nagging question appears in the back of your mind: “Why on earth am I watching this?” Watching this show gives you the eerie feeling of déjà vu because it resembles so much a random parliamentary session, politicians discussing the interpretation of the presidential election law or an interview with Michel Aoun [1].

The best illustration of this is the “competition” in the middle of the show whereby the men have to execute a certain task. The “winner” can take a girl of his choice out for a date. However, the way they show you the race is so utterly senseless that you have no idea who won: there’s not even the effort by LBC to show a dramatic race whereby you can see who’s in the lead and who is running up. Winning, losing, it really doesn’t matter, not in Lebanon. Indeed, you could be watching parliamentary elections!

The whole show radiates uselessness, packed up in a nice setting with lots of dance and semi decent artists, like Masari and the usual suspect Haifa. Of course, having a useless TV show is nothing new, pretty much all TV shows share this quality. So why does this one stick out? It must be the total disrespect for the viewer, whom according to LBC no doubt, must be either below 5 or reassuringly senile to enjoy the program.

Only thing is, we WILL be watching it again coming Friday…hrm…

[1]: For those readers who feel I always pick on Michel Aoun, the reason is nothing personal. It’s just that he is such an easy target. Take his statements this weekend after meeting with the patriarch. First, he states that he fully abides by democratic rules and that’s why he is running for president. Fair enough, so far he makes perfect sense: in a democracy anyone can run.

But then he continues: if he will not become president, he will block the elections altogether. Huh? This would mean that he would already know the outcome of the elections before they take place, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to boycott them. Now how democratic is that, exactly?

As the reader can see, it’s statements like these that are just too good to pass up for any blogger:-)