“This is the golden rule. It’s our job, as the wedding band, to make sure that this is the big day for everyone.”
 
Wedding Band follows the exploits of Seattle-based indie wedding band Mother of the Bride. The band consists of lead singer (and permanent bachelor) Tommy (Brian Austin Green), lead guitarist and family man Eddie (Peter Cambor), Eddie’s younger brother drummer Barry (Derek Miller), and new band member Stevie (Harold Perrineau). After the band is hired to play at Tommy’s ex-girlfriend’s wedding, they catch the eye of Roxie Rutherford (Melora Hardin), head of the city’s largest event-planning company, who puts her assistant Rachel (Jenny Wade) in charge of monitoring them. However, Rutherford Events is also the home to Mother of the Bride‘s rivals, the “British” Def Leppard tribute band Armageddon It, led by one of Tommy’s high school classmates (Ken Marino).

Each episode of Wedding Band finds Mother of the Bride working some new event, each with a different (and often crazy) theme. Some of these include a Comic-Con wedding, an adult prom, Octoberfest, a skateboard wedding and a divorce party. The musical performances are great—and actually fully performed by the cast. There are at least three songs per episode, and each is a unique cover of a new or classic song that has been tailored to the event at hand—whether that be a country version of “I Will Survive” or a rock version of “Hava Nagila”. It’s quite impressive at how much this cast does.

Wedding Band is a one-hour dramedy which mixes the perfect blend of action and comedy into an hour that flies by. Not only do we see the band in their element, performing at these events, but we also get to see the drama between these characters. The episodes aren’t simple one-offs like a sitcom—the characters are fully developed and the serialized drama of their personal lives plays out across the entire season.

The series also has some really great guest stars including Bree Turner, Megan Fox, Ryan Hansen, Molly Sims, Fiona Gubelmann, Kurtwood Smith, Gary Cole, Barry Watson, Donald Faison, James Marsters and Erinn Hayes.

This DVD set is a bit mis-named—it really should be called “The Complete Series”. Wedding Band is a wonderful series that was mistreated by TBS—after sitting on the shelf for almost two years, it was finally burned off on Saturday nights. So it was pretty much dead before it even had a chance. This is such a shame, because I thoroughly enjoyed this series, and wish there were more episodes in the works. I think TBS just didn’t know what to do with the series since they primarily had 30-minute sitcoms.

The sound quality of the DVDs is great—the dialogue is clear and the musical performances sound wonderful. For the most part, I also found the picture quality to be really good—there were only a few scenes where it didn’t look almost indistinguishable from the original HD TBS airings. It was disappointing that there weren’t more bonus features on the set, but seeing as the series is almost 3 years old at this point, I’m glad we at least got what we did.

Overall, I found the series to be just as enjoyable the second time around watching on this DVD set. It’s definitely worth picking up and checking out this gem of a series that was never given the chance it deserved.

What’s Included on the DVD:

Episodes: (424 min)

• All 10 episodes of the series
  Disc 1: “Pilot”, “I Love College”, “Don’t Forget About Me”, “Time of My Life”
  Disc 2: “Get Down on It”, “We Are Family”, “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, “99 Problems”,
  Disc 3: “Personal Universe”, “End of the World As We Know It”
• Audio: English Dolby Digital 5.1
• English SDH, Spanish, French subtitles; Closed Captioned

Extras:

• Wedding Band Jukebox
  Watch the musical performances from the episodes contained on the current disc. Select from the individual songs, Play All, or Shuffle.
• Finding the Rhythm: Music and Comedy (7:08)
  Interviews with the cast and producers, who talk about the show’s musical performances.
• Wedding Themes (6:27)
  The producers and cast talk about how they went about choosing the songs for each episode, how they tried to tie these to the theme of the wedding of the week, and making these covers their own.

Final Thoughts:

Wedding Band was a entertaining series that was mistreated by TBS. It is a great blend of comedy, drama and some awesome musical performances. The DVD picture and sound quality are great, but the set is lacking in bonus material. However, Wedding Band is such a fun show that I highly recommend checking it out on DVD to see what you missed, or to enjoy it all over again.