Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Marriage Or Mortgage’ On Netflix, Where Couples Decide Whether To Use Money For A Wedding Or For A House

The idea behind Marriage or Mortgage is pretty simple: You have a chunk of money to spend. Would you rather spend it on a memorable wedding and reception or use it as a down payment on a house? With the escalating cost of weddings these days, it’s a question many couples have been asking. Couples get to tour wedding venues as well as houses around Nashville, and they get to decide what they’ll use the money for.

MARRIAGE OR MORTGAGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A couple talks about what they’d like their wedding to be. “Evan, you can say that you want our wedding to be the best that anyone’s been to,” says bride-to-be-Liz to her groom-to-be. He agrees.

The Gist: In this Nashville-based series, wedding planner Sarah Miller and realtor Nichole Holmes show couples what they can do with the budget they have for either that wedding or that house. Miller, the hopeless romantic, gets the couples’ wish list and shows them two venues, and two options for guest transportation, discussing how much each will cost. Then Holmes takes the couple around to three area houses, trying to meet everything on the couple’s wish list. The couple then has to decide whether to use their budget for the wedding or the house.

For Evan and Liz, the venues included a brewery, and the transportation choices included a party bus. And when Miller makes her push to convince them to have the wedding, she gets some breaks on things like drapery in order for them to afford the food truck they want. Holmes shows them three houses that are going to be varying distances from Evan’s new downtown job; the main feature the couple wants are a fenced-in backyard to their adorable bulldog. As some incentives, Holmes throws in a doghouse with the pup’s name on it and a Golden Tee game for Evan’s man cave.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Marriage or Mortgage is a strange mash-up of House Hunters with a generic wedding show.

Our Take: Marriage or Mortgate is a pleasant-enough show, something that wouldn’t have been out of place on HGTV or TLC. There’s no snarkiness on this show, which is rated TV-G, just happy couples looking at cool wedding stuff and nice-looking houses. It’s not even anger-inducing like the aforementioned House Hunters is, because the couple has a realistic budget and realistic expectations.

The problem we have with the show is that it’s too contrived. Holmes and Miller share an office and greet each other in the morning as if they had a real business, when you know in reality that such a business would never exist. When Miller shows the couple the wedding venues and transport choices, she asks them to make a decision on the spot, which makes us wonder if the venue was already chosen. And as anyone who’s familiar with the House Hunters filming process knows, the actual houses that are being shown may not actually be for sale.

As charming as everyone on the show was, from Miller and Holmes to the cute couple Liz and Ryan, the entire exercise felt like a stitched-together pastiche of other reality formats, and it just felt like the seams were showing. Were the “discounts” Miller got from the venue real? Was the Golden Tee game that Holmes offered the couple as an incentive as valuable as it seemed (it was nice, but not as expensive as you might think)? It also feels like the producers played up Liz’s insecurity about how much things cost for a one-day affair in order to misdirect; a logical watch may have gotten you to the conclusion the couple came to. But logic doesn’t play into shows like these.

All that being said, though, Marriage Or Mortgage is a breezy, inofftensive show that might serve to be a good distraction between watching heavier shows.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: We see the couple enjoying their choice. We won’t tell you what that choice was in case you want to find out for yourself.

Sleeper Star: We are very happy that the couples the show is featuring are a bit more diverse than some of what we’ve seen on other home/wedding shows. Same-sex couples, older couples, couples that have people of color in them are all featured. We hope to see more of that if the show gets further seasons.

Most Pilot-y Line: COVID likely interrupted many of the plans of the couples that chose the wedding over the house. Are we going to find out if they lost money when they lost their venue or if downscaling helped them get the wedding and the house?

Our Call: STREAM IT. While Marriage Or Mortgage may be a cobbled-together version of other, better reality shows, it also has enough charm to it to make it a fun watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Watch Marriage Or Mortgage On Netflix