“It’s interesting how young people talk about love,” observes Sean Bean’s Ian to his wife Emma, played by Unforgotten’s Nicola Walker. “They always talk about the heat, the passion, the excitement… if I wrote a song about you… I guess you couldn’t fit all that into one song.” Well, that’s exactly what Stefan Golaszewski attempts with Marriage – to condense nearly three decades of marital (dis)harmony into a four-part television series. Anchored by two great shows and with a primetime slot, this programming is slice of life at its most mainstream. Anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship will recognize the claustrophobia, inertia and day-to-day drudgery of marriage/marriage. But why would we want to see it on TV? It’s bad enough to live through it. And Golaszewski, whose previous work includes Him & Her and Mum, doesn’t let viewers off the hook. There’s no music – often just the sound of a ticking clock to remind you of the time you’re wasting – and scenes can be indulgently long. There is, for example, a sequence of almost seven minutes after the preparation of a sandwich. Is this arthouse television? Or just someone making a sandwich? Ceci n’est pas une sandwich, Golaszewski seems to be saying, but maybe, sometimes, a sandwich is just a sandwich. Fortunately, the plot – if there is any – starts to pick up in the second episode. Ian struggles to re-enter the workforce, while Emma’s affair with a colleague, Jamie (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), begins to erode the stability of the marriage. Both are united in their interest in their daughter Jess (Chantelle Alle): she is in a relationship with an apparently controlling man (played, with horrendous greasiness, by Jack Holden) who won’t let her drink or eat salad, but he talks about marriage all the time. “What do you think about marriage?” he asks her. “I think marriage is old-fashioned,” he replies. “It’s like a relic from a time when there were boundaries.” But whether you get far enough to see those levers pulled will depend on your tolerance for glacial pacing and lack of thematic urgency. Many topics are covered: the loss of children and parents, adult social care, adoption, domestic abuse, long-term unemployment and much more. But they depend on a portrait of lifelong cohabitation and codependency, which while very true is not very interesting. And, at times, its depiction of lower-middle-class life – where people constantly rave about prices and complain about the “oily” food in Spain – seems almost performative in its everydayness. No doubt accolades and awards will be given to the writing and acting of Marriage, making the tedium of my experience a trifle. But if I wanted to see a man in his underwear drink milk straight from the carton, I could treat myself to a live performance. And the subject would be equally oblique and possibly non-existent. “It was a bit boring, maybe,” admits Ian, another day spent in a haze of redundancy. “God, I’d like a chance to be bored,” Emma replies. So boy, Emma, have I got you the show?
