‘Hitched or Ditched’ on the CW

Twenty years ago, the premise, not to mention the title, of the CW’s new reality series “Hitched or Ditched” would have made perfect sense as a romantic comedy, possibly starring Julia Roberts. Due to circumstances outside their control, a longtime couple is given a week to plan and execute a free and fabulous “dream wedding” with the final outcome -- will both say “I do”? -- an open question until the wedding official leads them through the actual vows.

Instead, Ms. Roberts is nowhere to be seen, and “Hitched or Ditched” takes us one step closer to whatever the lasting legacy of reality television will be. A populist revolution in which the lives of people who are not cops or docs or lawyers finally shoulder their way into network prime time? A country in which every citizen has one or another personal crisis or milestone televised?

Who knows. But for all its squirm-inducing premise, “Hitched or Ditched” offers a surprisingly clear and contained window not only on a certain segment of modern romance, but the pressures that surround it.

And because we get a new couple each week, the segments move right along, mercifully devoid of the drawn-out and manipulative “tensions” that plague so many television shows, both reality and dramatic.

In the pilot, which is rather amazingly titled “Bastards Out of Carolina,” we meet Charlotte, N.C., couple Travis, 32, and CeLisa, 26. They’ve been on and off for four years, and one of CeLisa’s friends thinks (and, presumably, CeLisa too) that it’s time they took the plunge. Only thing is, no one thinks they’re even remotely suited for each other. Oil and water is a term that comes up.

Travis, who is almost cartoonishly good-looking, is displayed as the calmer of the two, with CeLisa described in such a way as would lead one to believe she is possibly bipolar. (Although when her first words to her father are “Are you drinking?” -- and of course he is -- much is rather painfully explained.)

Left to analyze the action alone, the trouble seems to boil down to the fact that she wants to be able to go out to bars with her girlfriends and get slammed and he doesn’t want her to. While a bigger test of their suitability might be their both agreeing to participate in “Hitched or Ditched,” the I-still-want-to-party divide is no doubt more common. Certainly the less-than-polished family members -- the “institute of marriage” is referred to at one point -- are quickly and gratefully recognizable to those of us who grew up in homes that were not part of the upwardly mobile urban enclaves that still dominate television.

A subsequent episode, “The White Devil,” is even more pointedly political. In it, a 10-year biracial couple (he’s black, she’s white) face relentless and hostile disapproval from his mother (see episode title), who actually seems less affronted by her possible daughter-in-law’s race than by her refusal to knuckle down and learn traditional wifely skills.

There is lip service paid to the glamour of planning a wedding that will be paid for by someone else, but the value of “Hitched or Ditched” is its willingness to acknowledge the currently unpopular notion that family, as opposed to the faux-family friend-herd, still matters. And in ways that remain difficult to articulate.

The weddings themselves are painful affairs, sparsely attended due to, one assumes, the speed of the process, the very real possibility of public humiliation and of course the need to accommodate all the cameras.

And honestly, the idea of being rejected, or accepted for that matter, by one’s longtime lover on television registers fairly high on the fall-of-Rome scale. One can only hope that, as with so much of “reality television,” there is indeed a script so everyone knows what’s coming. It’s horrible enough, even so.

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mary.mcnamara@latimes.com

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‘Hitched or Ditched’

Where: The CW

When: 9 tonight

Rating: Not rated