Engaged: Fake Reality By Real Couple

Last night I was talking to a fellow cineaste who recently discovered The Hills. I tried to guide him through the hall of mirrors that is the question of fakeness on this “unscripted drama” –– Are they being themselves? Are they acting? Are they acting like themselves? Are they acting like “themselves”? –– but after awhile it basically blew his mind. “Man, this is way too sophisticated for me,” he said. “The Hills blows [Iranian realist auteur] Abbas Kiarostami out of the water.”

The mind-blowing ambiguity that clouds any assessment of realness in the age of fake reality is spoofed in Engaged The Show. It’s a fake reality show written and directed by Matt Enlow and starring his real-life girlfriend Christine Weatherup, and it tracks an engaged couple who have apparently seen too many reality shows to actually behave like real people. Its over-the-top, mocking comic tone is, at first, fairly irksome, but by the third episode, the show seems to be edging beyond simple spoof territory and towards a more complete character study of at least one half of the initially unbearable couple at its center.

Chrissie is a perky, passive-aggressive daddy’s girl; Keith (played by Ted DeVirgilis) is a man-boy DJ. In the first episode, they finish each other’s sentences in the least cute way imaginable while recalling Keith’s accidental proposal. This entire episode seems to tell us two things: 1) These people are awful, and 2) They may actually be stupid and self-centered enough to make it all the way to the altar, at which point they’ll be in for a lifetime of mutual torture. There are elements here of Bridezilla, The Bachelor and countless other reality shows about reality-blind ego-monsters trying to get married. Like those shows, Engaged seems at first to really be about making the audience feel content with the knowledge that their own relationships and attitudes toward relationships in general are not that bad.

But Engaged starts to become more complex in its second and third episodes, both of which center on Chrissie and Keith’s squabbles over the procurement of a ring. This may be, in part, due to the introduction of supporting characters (Chrissie’s country club snob friends, one of whom brunches with her nose job bandage still in place, and Keith’s Wii-playing, marriage-mocking dude friends) whose over-the-top antics make Chrissie and Keith seem like plausibly real people. Both the prospective bride and groom seem to be progressively letting go of their assumed camera-ready personas as the show goes on, and it seems like this could end up being a semi-serious study of the conflict between public and private, internal and external in romantic relationships.

It’s hard to say where the show’s going to go from here, either narratively or tonally, and that makes it hard to offer an unequivocal recommendation. But at this point, Engaged is worth taking a look at just for the two lead performances alone. The chemistry between DeVirgilis and Weatherup is spot on, and by the third episode, I almost forgot that I was watching actors and not actual reality show douchebags.