Deranged Marriage

When I was a girl, the notion of arranged marriage symbolized the vast difference between India, land of birth, and America, land of the independent. If we could adapt our image and actions to blend in with the pale landscape of suburban life, then we could escape the trap of family obligation and expectations. The idea that such assimilation counteracts true independence doesn't occur to a 10-year-old immigrant smarty-pants.

I channeled my adolescent racial anxiety into fighting with my parents about the backwardness of the arranged marriage and asserting (unsuccessfully) my right to date. Dating was American and modern; parental arrangement was archaic and oppressive. When you're 7, you want to eat hotdogs for dinner to prove you're American. When you're 15, you want to go on a date. But instead of dating, my sister and I watched our cousins' passport-style photos make the rounds of daughter-in-law seeking families, feeling grateful that we were too young to be publicly assessed for color, weight, talent and beauty.

This season, the Fox network turned its greedy reality TV eye toward the enduring practice of arranged marriage through an eight-week series called "Married by America, " which came to a predictable anticlimax last Monday night. Naively, I thought this must be some new form of cultural flattery or appropriation, like Madonna and her bindi, or the image of Krishna on a $20 T-shirt.

During Episode 1, I realized that appropriation would be an improvement. A quick comparison of the show to my own family's arrangements revealed a mountain of insulting simplifications.

While the show reproduces one or two elements of the Indian-style arrangement, such as the family meeting the prospective partner first, the Americanization of the process dumbs it down until all that's left is sex and pop psychology. The consumer audience replaces the family as the central decision-maker, and no one benefits from the shift.

Produced by the same three men who brought you "Joe Millionaire," "Married by America" banks on the nutty premise that exhausted, heartsick daters will try anything -- even letting their families and the viewing public choose their mates. The winners are meant to split $100,000 and a luxury car. If they stay married, though it's not clear for how long, they get a $500,000 house. The usual reality things happen. Aspiring brides, grooms and actors audition. Experts screen them for psychoses, STDs, poverty and existing spouses.

Five people are chosen as eligible brides and grooms, for whom the audience will choose partners. Each eligible bachelor(ette)'s panel of three family members/friends questions and eliminates potential mates, narrowing the field to two with help from the audience, while the eligibles sit in sound-proof booths. After hearing a plea from the bachelor(ette) to look under the surface for a kind heart, big boobs and other such requirements, viewers call in their choices to 1-800-I-WANT.

The couples meet and get engaged in the same 30 seconds. They drive off in SUVs to North Copper Ranch, where they live together for six weeks. We get the porn-lite benefit of watching them make out on the couch and roll around under the covers. They endure interviews with three experts, who eliminate one couple per week.

Every bachelor(ette) and potential mate is white. The only exception is Cortez, a Mexican-American woman from San Jose who provides the show's cultural credentials by claiming to know something about arranged marriage from her grandparents whose union lasted 50 years. The audience buys this and fixes up Cortez with Matt, to whom she says two weeks later, "You shouldn't have to make a relationship work. It either does or it doesn't."

Finally, by Episode 7, we're down to two couples. Kevin and Jill look the most likely. He's a former minor league baseball player; she's a hostess for the New York Islanders hockey team. But there are problems. She won't promise not to pose for Playboy again and he's unemployed.