TV Reviews : Comic ‘Married Life’ Knocks Reality TV

“Married Life,” a four-part sur-reality series beginning Sunday evening on Comedy Central, pretty much sums up what it has to say about wedlock half-way through the first episode before lunging, often hilariously, into its true concern: The rampant irresponsibility of “reality TV.”

Here, oily documentary filmmaker George Britton (series writer and director Ken Finkleman) and his cameras intrude upon and virtually destroy the lives of Frank and Ivy Collins (Robert Cait and Karen Hines). It’s an amusing enough conceit until you realize that Albert Brooks did the exact same thing back in 1979--foreseeing the commercialization of Big Brother, rather than responding to it--with his first film, “Real Life.”

In Sunday’s episode, family members one-up each other with lurid afternoon-talk-style confessions at the wedding rehearsal. Britton asks Frank and Ivy to spice up their reality in the second episode; they respond with his-and-hers affairs, a botched robbery and a clash with a competing reality series camera crew.

Finkleman reaches the apotheosis of his series’s absurdity in episode three, in which Frank and Ivy bail on him, forcing him to go with actors, and eventually extras playing actors, in “a dramatization of a simulation.”

Having accomplished that, the fourth episode peters out prematurely, with Frank and Ivy moving on to a “reali-com” with hack writers recruited for the purpose of “punching up your lives.”

Reality TV may be an awfully tired target these days, but few have skewered it as keenly as Finkleman’s “Married Life.”

* “Married Life” premieres Sunday at 7:30 p.m. on Comedy Central.