Netflix's The Big Day Review: Jaw-dropping inside story of brides, grooms

If the show Indian Matchmaking was about how families seek Seema Taparia, matchmaker extraordinaire, to help find the best match possible for their choosy young men and women, The Big Day, which just dropped on Netflix, is all about couples at their super-fancy weddings. I watched it with disbelief and amazement mixed with pity.

Someone said: “These weddings are on the OTT platform so that people from other cultures are amazed.” I want to scream that it offers a very loud, very shiny, very odd picture of ours! But I watch with the same fascination one has for road accidents and yet I am amused because the show has been made with a sense of self knowledge. The Big Day is not trying to lay out an academic paper on Indian culture. For me, it offered the same ‘feels’ as though someone sprayed really expensive champagne all over your silk saree just when you were trying to not scream in pain because the cork hit you in the eye.

It’s natural to compare this wedding show with the matchmaking one that came before. Even though the two shows are not related at all, this seems to pick up after that other show, which gained much social media notoriety. This chooses six pairs of brides and grooms getting ready for their one big day (or one big week!). It sets up its premise by calling the episodes ‘Collection’. These are not regular weddings.

I must admit that I loved the couple who went ‘source local’, buy only ‘eco-friendly’ things, and went to the finer aspects of having seeds in wrapping paper which would sprout if thrown in the ground. The bride went to Sanganer (near Jaipur, famous for block prints) to source the right fabric, paper, chose designs and the decor was mustard flowers (you see them in real life and in most Yash Raj Bollywood scenes from Punjab). Loved the dad and mum playing Raj and Simran in the mustard field too. I nodded in approval because the couple seemed to know how important it was to offer locals employment during the wedding season.

I loved how the friend of the gay couple from Goa tried to organise a church wedding for them and laughed when he said the church thought permission for one wedding would be construed by everyone to mean “the church encourages this sort of a thing”. The show does not specify when exactly the wedding happened, but it was lovely to see how wonderful it was when they got married and how family and friends just made that experience ‘happen’.

The way it was

‘Making weddings happen’ used to be a family affair once. Everyone, including the aunt who once knew the family of the original maker of ras malai is consulted. Grandmas, family elders know rituals and added to the fun. There are tantrums of aunts or an uncle to be dealt with and oneupmanship anticipated among chachis and mamis and what have you over clothes and jewellery.

There’s inevitably some unidentified snotty kid who pops up in every picture adding to the laughs. Perhaps in the middle of it all, kids will find a glass of water with someone’s dentures! There’s endless cups of tea and impromptu sessions of antaksharis that make the task of making 5,000 laddoos easy. You watch as dads and uncles who have escaped all decision making by saying the women know best, get into the swing of things and dance to the shaadi favourite, ‘Ei meri zohrajabeen!’ while turning their wives into blushing damsels.

I felt a little sorry for the parents in the show. They claimed on camera that they were happy that the bride and groom were managing the ‘show’, and insisted that “we support the children”, but there seemed to be a resigned acceptance. “The kids have decided everything, so we are just here (at fancy hotels across continents) for the ceremonies.” It just felt so dispassionate and boring for everyone except the bride.

What’s the point?

If weddings are so meticulously planned and executed, the fun is somehow lost. Yes, you will see friends from around the world showing up to enjoy the extravagance. Everyone from the family there too, along with beautifully turned out wedding guests dancing and laughing and living it up. But this claims to be ‘reality’, no? Then I want to see the real heartfelt reaction of the siblings of the bride — who were going to surprise their sister with a dance — being told that they couldn’t because the bridezilla didn’t like the song and wanted to be ‘surprised’ with a different one. While I shouted, ‘Seriously?!’ at the screen when I saw the bride clapping hard for that performance, it would have been memorable had the siblings dumped her in the pool.

That blushing bride made me wonder if she fell off her privileged perambulator as a baby. I have worked with people (bankers, product managers) who use spreadsheets to communicate when sharing product details. I use spreadsheets to mark attendance of students (and am grateful for new classroom apps that get students to sign in on their own).

But why does any bride want to plan everyone’s clothes, shoes, jewels, because they need to be ‘perfect’? Since when is ‘It’s a black-tie event’ not enough intimation? How instagrammable does your life have to be if you will not allow for any imperfection like an uncle who will wear funny socks with his sherwani? How annoying it must be to have someone so anal about everything! It’s fine to have fun and splurge on matching designer outfits, but who writes a poem to themselves from their father and gets their father to read it? And why does the father agree?

Who are these people? What do they do? Why do they agree on everything? The wedding planners agree to the outrageous demands (and they must be getting paid even though the bride is doing all the work!). The grooms agree because love makes them believe that the sun shines out of every pore of their respective brides, and because “she’s always been like this, you know, a perfectionist”. Everyone agrees to whatever the bride says because no one thought to say: “Shut up with your stupidity, already!” Papa just shells out the money for this agreeable perfection. I was a little disappointed that not a single couple said: “We are paying for the wedding.”

One young man insisted that he did not mind that his bride earned more than he did, but the fact that he mentioned it looked like the beginnings of a problem. He tried to be ‘modern’ and ‘woke’ but his momentary discomfort was one of the most honest things on the whole show.

Although I gasped at the thousands of mustard stalks that were chopped off the fields to decorate someone’s wedding, nothing compares to the horror fantasy that was Alice In Wonderland meets Victorian England meets Bollywood and the bride who’s just gushed about the hallway looking like something from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom! To top it, she says: “When I saw what you can do in India, you can create these beautiful sets...It was like almost every single thing I could have wanted in a marriage ticked off.”