Wed
David Rose (Dan Levy), Patrick Brewer (Noah Reid), and Moira Rose (Catherine O’Hara) in Schitt’s Creek.
“Can we just get married already? I’m kidding. I want pageantry that takes months and months to plan.” David Rose, Schitt’s Creek
The final episodes of Schitt’s Creek [spoiler alert] wrap up the story by giving each member of the Rose family a big transition and happy ending. Johnny and Moira prepare their return to the glamorous life, their ships having come in. Alexis and Ted tactfully and lovingly end their relationship when they recognize that they are growing in different directions. And David and Patrick plan the most fabulous wedding the town has ever seen. The final episode pulls in all the classic tropes of a sitcom wedding, like the ravings of a monster bride, a Three’s Company-style miscommunication that builds up to a zinger with a brilliant triple entendre, and a series of last-minute disasters that give all of the characters a chance to be their best (not to mention most endearing and funniest) selves.
For me, Schitt’s Creek soars alongside other perfect TV shows, shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Golden Girls, black-ish, Fleabag, and Abbott Elementary. The characters are simultaneously wildly caricatured and seriously familiar. The writing and acting and every aspect of the production have set a bar that many shows will shoot for and very few will reach. It blends, perfects, and expands the fish-out-of-water, workplace, and family genres. I love everything about Schitt’s Creek…except for the penultimate scene, the moment that ties the whole show together: David and Patrick’s wedding.
Let me be clear (lest the show’s die-hard fans start assembling at my door with torches and pitchforks): the scene isn’t bad or poorly done. It’s just disappointing. Here are the salient details:
The ceremony occurs at Town Hall, which has been transformed from a decrepit auditorium into a lush sanctuary swathed with white fabric and flowers. A central aisle leads from the entrance, hidden by one set of curtains, to a dais with a podium, a frame of flowers, and another set of curtains. Guests sit on either side of the aisle, facing forward.
A string quartet plays Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (a delightful and ironic detail bothfor the episode’s twists and for a gay wedding, a detail that probably only liturgical nerds like me noticed) and Patrick and his father, serving as his Best Man, emerge on the dais from behind the curtains and take their positions at the top of the aisle.
The Jazzagals, the town’s female a cappella ensemble, stand in a ring around the gathered guests and sing James Morrison’s “Precious Love” to begin a procession of Moira (who is pinch-hitting as the officiant and dressed in a bishop’s miter and vestments), and Johnny and Stevie (serving as David’s Maid of Honor) in fetching tuxes. The Jazzagals shift to Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best,” a poignant throwback for fans of the show to Patrick’s serenade to David, and after a brief freak-out about accidentally wearing a wedding dress and a tender moment for the siblings, Alexa escorts David, carrying a small bouquet of flowers, down the aisle and gives him away.
Moira makes the requirements of her job as officiant clear: she’s there to look ceremonial and sound wise. She begins with a reflection on life and love and family. “Our lives are like little bébé crows,” she says, drawing on knowledge gained during her recent film role, “carried upon a curious wind, and all we can wish for our families, for those we love, is that that wind will eventually place us on solid ground.” It’s a remarkably fitting metaphor - for the wedding, for the community, and for the show - and the ritualist in me can’t resist celebrating the way she frames the moment for everyone present (including the viewing audience). This ceremony would make space and time for the Rose family, the town that absorbed and bolstered them, and the viewing audience to mark a transition (a wedding, career and life shifts, the end of a TV era), to identify the solid ground they’ve found together, to reflect on the impacts felt, and to start to create the next chapters in their lives.
Moira invites the couple to share their vows. Not unlike most other depictions of weddings on TV or in films, the vows are less “vows” (public declarations of commitment) and more “gushes.” The closest language to commitment that Patrick uses is in the Mariah Carey lyric he sings, “You’ll always be my baby,” and David delivers a blend of feelings and praise, finally declaring, “Patrick Brewer, you are my happy ending.”
Moira, invoking the most recognizable and most traditional wedding language around, asks each to affirm that he takes the other “to be your lawfully wedded husband,” pronounces them “husband and husband,” and declares, “You may kiss each other.” The community gathered around them applauds as they kiss and turn to exit down the aisle, followed by their families.
It’s all lovely, right? It looked like any other wedding on TV. But David and Patrick aren’t like any other couple on TV. David’s pansexual identity is never presented as a freakish curiosity or a social problem, and he gave viewers an elegant and relatable metaphor to understand the sexuality spectrum. “I like the wine,” he explained to Stevie, “not the label.” Neither Patrick nor his parents punished him for falling in love with a man. The couple explicitly explored at openness in their sexual relationship. David’s signature style stood out from the crowd, not just because of his severe and dramatic shades and shapes but because the clothes communicated everything that Dan Levy’s writing and acting couldn’t. Patrick happily left his conventional life for a risky business venture and an unexplored gender pairing; he was clearly not bound to tradition. And yet…Town Hall looked like any Protestant church in New England, the ceremony and their vows followed the same old heteronormative script that we’ve seen time and time again, and Moira’s final pronouncement and instruction to kiss echoed the archaic assumption that only a religious authority (she was wearing a bishop’s miter, remember) has the final word and bestows permission for sexual activity. From a show that demonstrated the ease of living in a world without punishing gender norms and such originality in storytelling, I expected a more authentic - that is, a queerer - wedding.
The problem isn’t Schitt’s Creek. The problem is a general lack of imagination in popular culture. Sure, we now see queer relationships spotlighted and celebrated in media. In June, suddenly every ad features an interracial queer couple and their demographically attractive children. We are even seeing more nuanced, more “authentic” and “realistic” portrayals of queer life, from Looking to Pose to Fire Island, but when queer characters invoke their hard-won right to marry, all nuance goes out the window. When Stanford & Anthony got married in the Sex and the City movie, the wedding didn’t reflect anything of their unlikely but “it just seems right” relationship. Instead, it was a comically over-the-top magnification of a traditional wedding - and it was fabulous - but it accidentally reinforced for its audience notions of what constitutes a wedding and all the heteronormative, sexist, and classist values baked in to that definition.
It’s hard to ignore that Hollywood (as shorthand for film, television, and the general entertainment industry) and the wedding industry are in sync. Maybe it’s a chicken/egg situation - does the industry reflect movies and TV, or do movies and TV reflect the industry? Either way, it’s a closed loop that doesn’t invite many differing approaches and that is sealed by cultural, economic, political, and religious authorities invested in maintaining a status quo. As a result, the “unique” weddings promised in magazines, on websites, and by vendors are just a reflection of what the colluding entertainment and wedding industries have made available. As a species, I think we’re more creative and imaginative than this.
I don’t want to just eschew practices because they’re old. Whether I agree with them or not, some people actually retain the values carried with those practices, so, for them, it’s an authentic practice, but I’m curious when people whose lived experience so obviously clashes with “traditional” values engage traditional practices without thinking more deeply about them. And, frankly, I’m baffled by officiants, event planners, and other vendors who advertise “unique” weddings but recycle the same old same old without analyzing whether they actually resonate with a couple’s life or how they might impact the overall experience of the wedding. For a queer couple, would you suggest catering your reception from Chik-Fil-A and inviting Lauren Boebert to give a toast? Probably not. So, I might ask David Rose’s wedding planner (or Dan Levy and his writing team), why would you suggest that a non-religious, queer couple indulge process down a church aisle to be “given away” as chattel, and pose in tableau, flanked by a wedding party whose composition and style mimics the royal courts of Europe? Even to prompt a hilarious and beautifully resolved conflict between David and Alexa, why introduce the traditional white wedding dress (and all the ghosts of sexual purity and oppressive misogyny that come with it) at all?
Maybe the problem isn’t a lack of imagination. Maybe the real problem is a deficit in our collective capacity for reflection. When couples start planning their weddings, they’re bombarded with resources for party planning, not for identifying their shared values and discerning how those values are or aren’t reflected in conventional wedding practices. Typically, the least prioritized aspect of the event is the ceremony itself, and instead of emphasizing the purpose of its central component - vows - as a public declaration of commitment, most websites and officiants bow to the Hollywood model and offer couples templates that erode the declaration of commitment into sentimental monologues. If deeply and deliberated discerned vows were the starting point for planning a wedding, we’d see many more authentic and original ceremonies and receptions. If vows were the starting point, planners and officiants wouldn't funnel couples into sharply defined pigeonholes and templates. If vows were the starting point, the wedding industry would actually engage and not manipulate couples’ identities, experiences, and values.
When I work with couples to design their ceremonies, my primary goal is to create a ritual, a moment, and an experience that is rooted in their identities, experiences, and values. The only requirement for the legitimacy of a wedding is the public declaration of commitment; everything else is gravy. Well, I don’t mean to be dismissive of gravy - it’s flavor, it’s texture, it complements the main course and extends culinary delight. It’s particularity. And from a cook who makes it with her own technique or his family’s recipe, who any taster can tell didn’t rely on a prepackaged mix, it’s originality. In the case of David and Patrick, everything from the New England church-like setting and the escorted walk down the aisle to the bishop’s blessing and pronouncement came from a can. A heteronormative, classist, and sexist can.
If David presented his wedding mood board with me, with the variety of traditions he wanted to invoke, I would’ve asked him to look at each component with three kinds of questions.
The first kind of question is historical. Where did it originate, and who perpetuated it? Why is this particular practice part of weddings in the first place? What ideas about gender, class, race, sexuality, and other aspects of identity are baked into it? What power dynamics does it wield? What was so attractive about this component and the ideas attached to it that we as a culture froze it, remained attached to it, even fought to preserve it?
The second kind of question is semiotic. What feelings or ideas are affirmed or reinforced, what feelings are challenged or dismissed? When we juxtapose or integrate a set of practices, what meaning do we make of it? How do our lived experiences let us see those practices differently? For witnesses of the wedding, what does the practice look and feel like? What message does it send? What or whom does it invoke? What does it trigger?
The third kind of question is ethical, the most important kind for discerning the authenticity and appropriateness of a practice. What impact does this practice make on the people participating in it, on the people witnessing it? Whom does it empower, and whom does it exclude? What does this communicate to guests, to the world? Does it align with the couple’s identities, experiences, and values? Does it perpetuate ideas that should be left behind?
These questions lead to resonance or dissonance and help people designing a wedding make informed design choices. They are an antidote to the siren’s song of excess and help a couple pare and refine the experience, but they also open space for creative solutions. And, most importantly, just as David and Patrick helped their audience to expand their notions of what a loving relationship looks like, these questions help us all expand our notion of what a wedding could be.
