Portia’s Suitors: a Review of ABC’s “The Proposal”

My wife and I met in the Seventies; we worked at the same publishing company and dated for far too long. Then I came to my senses, and we were married on April 29, 1984.

Watching three episodes of ABC-TV’s “The Proposal” occasions this remembrance. A woman (or man) looking for a spouse sits in a kind of isolation booth (as it was known on the old “The $64,000 Question,” but here called the “Pod”) and listens to ten suitors serially make the case for why he (or she) would be the perfect spouse. In successive rounds, ten contestants vie for “love” until the last two suitors make final pleas, now face-to-face with Pod Person.

It’s not exactly The Merchant of Venice with Portia judging the Princes of Aragon and Morocco, plus Bassanio and another. The Washington Post called “The Proposal” the “guiltiest of guilty pleasures.” If that’s true for you, for shame!

Host Jesse Palmer promises that this “has never before been attempted on television” and that the contestants have been vetted by a “blue-ribbon panel of matchmakers.”

Click here to read the rest of Mr. Miner’s column at The Catholic Thing . . .