Marriage is being disgusted by the holes in your husband’s boxer shorts. Marriage is judging your spouse for buying the “wrong” chicken. Marriage is showing your partner solidarity about the absurd prices of airport ketchup. Marriage is interrupting foreplay to put the dishwasher on. In short: marriage is boring. And at four hours long, BBC1’s new family drama, Marriage, more than mirrors that fact.
“It’s interesting how young people talk about love,” observes Sean Bean’s Ian to wife Emma, played by Unforgotten’s Nicola Walker. “They always talk about the heat of it, the passion, the excitement… if I wrote a song about you… I guess you couldn’t fit all that in a song.” Well, that’s almost exactly what Stefan Golaszewski is attempting with Marriage – to condense almost three decades of matrimonial (dis)harmony into a four-part TV series. Anchored by two superb performances and given a primetime slot, this is slice-of-life programming at its most mainstream. Anyone in a long-term relationship will recognise the claustrophobia, inertia and quotidian poignancy of marriage/Marriage.
