Should You Promise To Love, Honour, And Cherish Teenage Newlyweds?

What Is This Thing?

Three different teenaged brides embark upon the adventure of marriage. (The series title to the contrary, all the grooms are twenty or older.)

When Is It On?

Tuesdays at 10 PM ET on fyi.

Why Was It Made Now?

From Married At First Sight to Arranged to Married Life to Bride Or Prejudice to Mikie Saves The Date and now this, fyi is apparently trying to own the "weird marriage stories" space on TV.

What's Its Pedigree?

None to speak of, other than that which is conferred by its inclusion under fyi's big (wedding) tent.

...And?

All these shows (and I won't say how many of them I watch, but if you read this site, you know it's a lot!) live or die on the strength of their love-to-hate casting, and Teenage Newlyweds did a pretty good job, in that two of the three couples have significant train wreck potential. Joey and Emma (that's them at left in your graphic up top) -- aged twenty-one and nineteen, respectively -- are high school sweethearts. (Notably, while the other two couples make it clear that their religious commitment not to engage in premarital sex is part of the reason they're getting married so young, in the premiere we learn that Joey and Emma were both virgins when they met, though they do not specify whether they remained so prior to their wedding day.) While Emma is possibly not that smart (she seems to think the name of her home state of Oregon is pronounced "o-RAY-gun") but at least ambitious -- she's earning her degree in marketing and dreams of opening her own bakery -- Joey is apparently a post-secondary school dropout who's perfectly content to work at a local feed and seed store, which his own friends already think is going to lead to clashes with Emma down the road. Joey's career choices aside, he's also an idiot. He spends at least a couple of minutes of his own wedding rehearsal dinner cramming as many straws as he can into his beverage and then trying to drink out of it, as his mother- and father-in-law look on in disgust; on his wedding day, he misplaces the marriage license and forces a scramble among the whole wedding party to locate it in his car at home; he says that he wrote his wedding vows in advance only at Emma's insistence, since he'd wanted to "make them up as [he] went." Then again, Emma's wedding vows end on "I vow to be your Khaleesi, and you can be my Khal," so maybe she's not such a prize either. Oh, and they may already be at odds over having kids -- so there's lots of juicy stuff to work with here.

Then there's Travis (age twenty) and Brenda (age nineteen), at right in the top graphic. Both students at UC Irvine, they had vastly different upbringings: Brenda was raised by Lucia, a single mother whose experience as a field worker caused her to impress upon Brenda the importance of pursuing her education, and whom Brenda proudly credits as her first example of a feminist; Travis grew up middle class and is, apparently in line with his parents' values, politically conservative. Brenda's sister Miriam is concerned about the challenges their marriage will face due to their opposing political views, and we get evidence that she's right in the series premiere: when they drive past an anti-choice protest, Travis opines that abortion is a tragedy, to which Brenda says she feels bad for mothers who terminate their pregnancies. But when she asks how hardline he is in his anti-choice stance, and what he'd do if she were to become pregnant from rape, he tells her he would "advocate" for her to have the baby. My girl staunchly replies that she absolutely would not. "I hope that doesn't happen, because I'd probably be pretty upset," says Travis like a moron, like, certainly hope you'd be "upset" if YOUR WIFE WERE RAPED, YOU SHELTERED FUCKING DOPE. So yeah, I'm already very into watching how many stupid things this goon may yet heedlessly say on camera, for my mean yet gleeful judgment.

...But?

The third couple, George (age twenty-one) and Halie (age eighteen) -- by process of elimination, you've probably figured out they're in the middle of our triptych -- seem the most functional so far, although Halie's leaving her close-knit family in Arizona to move in with George in Utah, so their fights and strife just may not start until after that. The most compelling material they bring to the series premiere surrounds George's older brother Adam. Halie and George are Mormons, but Adam left the church as a teenager and has apparently spent every moment since then becoming a total try-hard apostate cliché. First of all, he looks like this.

"The whole structure of the LDS is not for me," he says in a TH. "That's just not where my heart's at. I mean, I don't believe in that. I drink. I smoke. I have premarital sex -- I do that, definitely." OOOOOOOOH, QUEL BADASS. However, since Adam is apparently not close with his family -- even in the series premiere blows off a special post-wedding "ring ceremony" that George and Halie organized especially for Adam since he was not permitted to enter the temple for their actual wedding -- my prediction is that he won't have a very big role to play in future episodes. George and Halie's nervous sexual fumblings could be compelling, since in the premiere we learn that the only person telling George anything about sex is his friend and fellow engaged virgin Jordan, and that he's only repeating what he's heard from his fiancée, who's gleaned some things from reading, though reading what, we don't know. However, it's likely that Halie and George will be too modest to talk much on camera about this aspect of their marriage. Boo.

...So?

If my DVR were fuller, this probably wouldn't make the cut. But it's summer, so this garbage show has hooked me for at least a couple more.