'Marriage' Comes to PBS Passport, But Doesn’t Commit to the Drama

Marriage is what brings us together today. But this series, streaming now on PBS Passport, is not a blessed arrangement. The show feels long for only four one-hour episodes, aiming for a slow-burn slice-of-life portrait of long-term married couple Ian (Sean Bean) and Emma (Nicola Walker). However, it drowns the audience in tedium and long silences. I kept waiting for breakthroughs or character revelations, which never materialized. The series advertises itself as a treatise on what it takes to keep a marriage going but winds up coming off as self-important, like it thinks it’s offering profound truths about relationships and human nature.

This is what marriage is, the show declares; the everyday banalities of doing dishes, watching TV, and having repetitive, shallow conversations with your spouse. And while that may be true for some, watching this couple’s bleak daily reality is not poignant. Editing would have improved the viewing experience by leaps and bounds. So many scenes play out with the audience watching Ian and Emma doing mundane tasks in real-time, in prolonged drawn-out silences. This is to showcase their boredom, disconnection, and loneliness. But the duration of these scenes gets excruciating.

The conversations that do happen are no less grueling: characters talk about unimportant, everyday things to avoid discussing big things. The moments that find characters speaking directly are refreshing, if only because they puncture the dreary subtlety of the rest of the series. Marriage is hard to watch because it often skews tedious and frustrating, not to mention depressing.