ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on the The Learning Channel (TLC) programme Say Yes to the Dress (2007–) which has become a prominent wedding-related reality television franchise, filling long hours of scheduling. Offering an “esthetic-textual” (White 2017) reading of this series, the analysis examines how the use of repetition serves to highlight the dramatic peaks of emotion that emerge around the bride and the dress. Together with the use of the reflective surface of the salon mirror, this play on repetition produces other affective intensities in “banal overflow” which exceed what we might have expected to be a strictly surveillant neoliberal gaze. In this way we argue that the form of the series, which at first sight directly supports ideological approaches to the “wedding industrial complex”, often de-centres the heterosexual couple in favour of the relational expression of affective modalities of care and kinship. We argue that it is important to understand the production of these other drives if we are to understand the enduring appeal of the wedding spectacle itself.
