Last week on A&E network fyi (formerly Bio), the series Arranged debuted, the first of 10 episodes looking at three different arranged marriages in America. Either planning or about to get married in episode one, the protagonist couples are:
► A gypsy/Romani couple in Queens, NY. The bride and groom to be are, respectively, ages 17 and 18. They live with the groom’s parents, and have never been alone before on even a date. His parents and grandparents have successful arranged marriages.
► A Bible Belt couple whose parents set them up. The young couple lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and he is a medical school resident.
► And a mid-30s East Indian couple who live together in Beverly Hills, and are in the throes of preparing their wedding. Both of their parents have successful arranged marriages.
While many dismiss the notion of arranged marriages, the series shares a sobering statistic. The divorce rate, which hovers around 50 percent for conventional marriages, is but a mere 4 percent in arranged matrimony.
Arranged is produced by Moxie Pictures, a commercial/branded content house which over the years has successfully diversified into features and television. In the latter arena, Arranged is the latest show from Moxie. Currently the company is in its third season of Animal Planet’s Ice Cold Gold which spotlights a spirited team of miners who are among the first Americans to prospect for precious metals and gems in parts of Greenland where people never have set foot before. Serving as exec producers on Ice Cold Gold and Arranged are Moxie CEO Robert Fernandez and veteran director and Moxie president Danny Levinson.
Moxie has built a foundation in nonfiction television. Levinson for example directed and co-wrote Uneven Fairways, a documentary about the history of African-Americans in the game of golf, for the Golf Channel. He also had his directorial hand in Head to Head, a docu-series about high school football in Mississippi, sponsored by Cellular South, co-produced with Y&R, and which ran on Fox Sports networks. Moxie additionally teamed with Wieden+Kennedy on It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports, a two-hour special on ESPN which consisted of five short films based on a W+K ad campaign. Moxie’s Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning documentarian, directed the ESPN special.
Levinson made his first industry mark as a commercial director with work spanning such brands as Nike, Delta and Toyota. He co-founded Moxie Pictures in 1992 and has been a driving force in the company’s diversification, which includes TV development and production. Moxie’s roster includes leading feature filmmakers (Morris, Ramin Bahrani) and commercial directors (such as Martin Granger and Frank Todaro).
Arranged airs Tuesday nights (10;15-11:15 pm ET) on fyi. Episode number two just ran this past Tuesday.
SHOOT: What drew you and Moxie to the subject of arranged marriages?
Levinson: We’ve been working on nonfiction television for a few years. We simply thought arranged marriage was an interesting topic. We researched it for years. Like any project in features or documentaries or TV, it takes a long time to get going. This project went through many different permutations. It started as a show about matchmaking and the first year of marriage in the Jewish Orthodox community. It ended up becoming about exploring arranged marriage through three different cultures–three very different cultural touchpoints–and fyi bought it.
SHOOT: Casting is so important in any project. How did you arrive at these three couples–and their families–for Arranged?
Levinson: We did searches, put out feelers, went on websites like The Knot, checked out wedding announcements, cross referenced with Linked In. We looked into a lot of couples whose marriages were arranged in one way or another. We scoured the planet for couples. We did a lot of casting sessions via Skype.
We wound up with three great, very different couples representing different cultures–whose families all believed in arranged marriages. We came up with a gypsy couple whose marriage is 100 percent classically arranged. Then we came up with an East Indian couple who met on a website but before the could go out, they had to be approved by their families. They’re a very modern couple, working professionals who are living together–but in separate bedrooms–before they get married. And the Southern couple was a match arranged by parents–the bride’s parents knew the groom’s parents, two of the parents back when they were single even dated each other years ago. The parents targeted each other kids. There was a familiarity there. And the parents arranged for their kids to get married.
Their stories all go beyond each couple. It involves their families and there are a lot of sides to the story of arranged marriages. The stories are complicated. A 17-year-old girl marrying an 18-year-old kid. They’re both nervous and unsure. It’s not indentured slavery. She can leave. But they both view this as sacred to their gypsy culture. Their parents and grandparents have successful arranged marriages.
These are all tight-knit families. They watch out for one another. They are super nice people. So there’s more to arranged marriage than people generally might think. You cannot judge a book by its cover. These couples and their families were open enough and authentic enough to let us witness their trials and tribulations. We have a young couple getting married who never spent alone time together. There are also cultural pressures that are brought to bear. This show takes you deeper into these different cultural worlds and the different world of arranged marriage.
SHOOT: Who are the directors you selected for Arranged?
Levinson: This type of television is different. There are supervising producers who go out and do the shooting, who in effect act as the directors. In TV, you have showrunners–they oversee the show and may direct some of the people. The showrunner on Arranged is Sven Nilsson whose done such shows as Push Girls and Little People, Big World. [Nilsson is also an Emmy-nominated editor for Friends, specifically the episode, “The One Before The Last One–10 Years of Friends.”]
Sven is also an executive producer on Arranged, along with Robby [Fernandez] and me.
SHOOT: What’s the biggest creative challenge that Arranged has posed to Moxie as a production company?
Levinson: Creatively with this series, you have to figure out what is happening in these people’s lives and highlight that. It’s more like a documentary where you are following what’s interesting. And postproduction is so much more intensive–especially when covering three couples and their families with different cultures and in different parts of the country–than anything in the commercial arena. It’s amazing how much time and energy goes into post in nonfiction television.
We work with Pivotal Post in Los Angeles which has a lot of rooms, a lot of bays. It takes a lot of manpower to realize a nonfiction TV show–editors, story producers and supervising story producers. We can have as many as nine editors at the same time working on different episodes.
We have a total of 10 episodes in season one. The first eight air consecutive weeks every Tuesday night on fyi. Then there’s a week’s break, after which the next two episodes run on consecutive Tuesdays.
