Here comes the bride. Again.

What’s the one thing that links many of Australia’s most average sitcoms of the last five years? No, it’s not that SOMETHING VERY DRAMATIC happens in the second-to-last episode. Although that does often happen too. *

The answer is that there’s a wedding – or a wedding of sorts – in the final ever episode. And having watched the wedding of sorts in the final episode of Mother and Son, it’s really starting to grind our gears.

In the final episode of series two, hopefully the last episode of Mother and Son ever, Maggie (Denise Scott) and Arthur (Matt Okine) have a joint birthday party, organised by their daughter/sister Robbie (Angela Nica Sullen).

Robbie, it’s been established over the series, isn’t great at listening to what other people want or need, so she goes off, without consulting Maggie and Arthur, and hires a big church hall, organises decorations she thinks are nice and buys a massive cake. All of which sounds like a great set-up for the worst joint birthday party of all time. And it is, except not in a way that is funny or makes a lot of sense.

You see, Robbie’s organised what looks, to anyone who isn’t her, exactly like the kind of party you’d organise if you were organising a wedding. There are white decorations, including something that looks kind of like a bridal arch, a big sign at the entrance to the hall reading “Maggie and Arthur’s big day”, and the pièce de résistance, a three-tiered cake with little figurines of Maggie and Arthur on top of it. Dressed in wife and groom gear.

Obviously, this was all intended by the writers to be a funny situation that we, the audience, laughed at. But what it actually felt like when watching it was that the people who made Mother and Son had lost their minds. No one would deliberately order all this stuff and think it was suitable for their mother and brother’s joint birthday party. Robbie is insensitive, self-absorbed, and greedy, but she’s not stupid or ignorant of what a reasonable person might read as a celebration of incest. So, as a plot, it didn’t work.

But it got us thinking, why end the series with a sort of wedding plot? And why have so many other sitcoms gone down that route in their final episode recently?

Australian sitcoms ending with a wedding dates back to at least 2007 (Kath & Kim), but it’s in the last five years that shows have really embraced the idea. In 2021, Rosehaven ended its fifth and final series with main characters and best friends Daniel (Luke McGregor) and Emma (Celia Pacquola) playing bride and groom in a rehearsal wedding officiated by Daniel’s mother Barbara (Kris McQuade). Promos featuring scenes from the rehearsal wedding, which looked every bit like a real wedding, attracted a lot of buzz, and, we’re guessing, prompted a lot of network executives to think that sitcom weddings guaranteed ratings and good times.

Aftertaste’s second and final series (2022) included a wedding, although, in a twist, it was in the first episode of the series rather than the last. This was followed by final episode wedding(-ish) plots in Wellmania (2023), Colin from Accounts (2024) and now Mother and Son. And almost none of these wedding(-ish) plots resulted in substantial laughs, feel-good moments, buzz or ratings. So why do shows keep doing it?

One reason is that weddings are a great way to a) bring a lot of characters together and b) set up the kind of high-stakes situation where there’s tension, drama and the potential for things to go wrong. Also, and this is a lesson Rosehaven took from the world of soap operas, wedding plots are a great way to get media coverage for your series. Especially if the “wedding” involves two leading characters.

But as for any of this being funny – and as we’ve discussed many times on this blog, being funny isn’t the point of a lot of Australian sitcoms these days – weddings don’t actually deliver laughs. Unless the show’s gone down the slapstick route, and the bride ends up in a septic tank, while the groom’s been hog-tied to a truck heading for Darwin, a wedding’s more likely to deliver touching, feel-good moments. Based on the last five years of Australian sitcoms, they’re mainly used as a device to prompt several previously fighting characters to come together and realise they actually agree with each other. As happened in Mother and Son.

And while that’s not the worst way to end a show, it’s worth noting that none of the really good Australian sitcoms of the last 30 years ended with a wedding. They ended with something right for the characters. Like Frontline ending with Mike Moore missing a flight because he’s lazy, inadvertently saving himself from being killed in a plane crash. Or how The Games ended with John, Gina, Bryan and Nicholas getting out of Sydney before shit went down. Or how Frayed ended with the Newcastle earthquake and some of the main characters floating the corpse of a man who deserved to die out to sea.

Funny, true to the characters and not a wedding in sight. That’s how you end a sitcom.

* See our various posts on the 2021-2022 sitcom Aftertaste if you want to read our moans about that.