SYTTD: S1, E1 – Here Comes The Bridal Salon/Three Times A Bride

Oh boy, here we go. For some insane reason – the pandemic? unemployment? an incurable brain disease that causes me to care about Pnina Tornai? – I have decided to watch every episode of the TLC show Say Yes To The Dress and grade them accordingly. My hope is that I can produce the Definitive Ranking of every single episode of this show. There are 305 episodes, so we’ll see how this goes.

The very first episode premiered October 12th, 2007, and seasoned viewers of SYTTD will quickly recognize that season one is a completely different animal. But here’s the thing: this is also Season 2, Episode 13 (retitled It’s My Wedding, But Don’t Tell The Bridesmaid). I first watched this episode on Amazon dot com and started writing this post – but while referencing the complete list of episodes via Wikipedia I realized that the episode that Amazon lists at S1E1 is actually S2E13. This led me down a rabbit hole.

Through ~methods~ I watched the original version of the episode that first aired in 2007. It reuses a lot of the same footage as the 2008 airing, but with different graphics and a third bride (!) at the end. My theory here is that SYTTD re-used and re-edited the first six episodes that they shot for Season 1 and used them for the back half of Season 2. Either way, this post will cover both versions since they use the same brides and most of the same footage.

But let’s meet our brides!

Introducing our first bride, Christine Furey, via the graphic used in the Season 1 version of the episode:

And this is what they used for the Season 2 version:

By the way, those are real graphics that TLC puts on screen. I just think it’s interesting to look at them side by side!

Christine Furey seems like a genuinely lovely person. She’s got a $3,000 budget and wants a ballgown or A-Line dress (or a mermaid, which her friend/bridesmaid hates). She’s been paired with a consultant named Audrey, who seems extremely capable and understandably suspicious of the reality television cameras that are now a part of her job. Christine has an entourage of her mom, who is very supportive, and two of her friends.

One of her friends is not shown speaking for the entire episode, and the other one is a holy nightmare that causes Audrey to bring a manager – Director of Sales Elise – into the appointment to intervene. Here’s Dynene – the bridesmaid’s – deal. She hates mermaid dresses. It almost seems like she is traumatized by them. Every time Christine comes out in a dress, Dynene keeps asking her if she can walk in them or sit in them (which, to be honest, I have always wondered) and generally makes her friend feel terrible about the dresses.

Christine does not end up with a mermaid dress.

This isn’t important to the context of the episode, but it’s important to me personally that you know this. Elise says that her biggest qualifications to work in bridals is that she has been engaged nine times and is on her third marriage. I hope it goes without saying that I would trust Elise with my life.

Back to the episode. Here is the dress that Christine picks:

And here is an Informative Caption, courtesy of the Season 1 version of the episode:

I should also note that they show Christine’s wedding, in which she is wearing a completely different dress, and it’s not acknowledged by the show at all.

On to our second bride, Kim Sozzi! Once again, she has two different graphics. Here is what we saw in the Season 1 episode:

And Season 2:

Kim Sozzi has an unlimited budget, needs a dress in 2 months, and has no idea what she wants. Amazing! I would be remiss to not point out that Derek Axelrod sounds like the name of a fake boyfriend who lives in Canada and is a professional BMX rider. Kim brings her mom, who is very supportive, and works with consultant Camille, a lip-liner devotee. We do get some Camille backstory in this episode. She first came to Kleinfeld’s in 1999 to buy a dress for herself, but ended up losing her husband and needing a job. Camille is a legitimately great consultant and I remember her sticking around here for several seasons. Yay!

Kim is not like other girls and she really wants you to know that. She hasn’t spent her whole life dreaming about her wedding, which means that she is woefully under-prepared for this kind of timeline. Honestly, Kim is pretty boring, time-crunch aside. She ends up with a simple satin gown, alterations are fine, and her wedding is peak-2007 gaudy excellence. Unlike Christine, she does actually wear the dress that she picks.

And here’s the Informative Caption:

She does have a classic “bridal moment” though. Good for Kim.

A third bride, Gayle, comes in for alterations and has a meltdown over a very small alteration. She has a heavily beaded sweetheart neckline ballgown and needs the bodice to be “scaled down” to avoid what Elise gently refers to as “tiny head syndrome” and I don’t even know what to do with this whole scene.

My queen, Alterations Manager Vera, talks her down and solves the problem in literally five minutes by lowering the neckline of the dress by 1/2″ at most. Gayle looks great, everything is fine, and the world will continue to rotate on its axis.

Interestingly, in the Season 1 version of the episode, we have a fourth bride: Nicole Rae Peckwasser, which is an incredible name. She comes to find a dress with five people in her entourage: four of her future in-laws and her mother. However, the episode literally never comes back to Nicole. Does she get a dress? No idea!

Moving on!

Kleinfeld’s has a blowout sale and it’s very exciting for everyone involved, but very boring for me, a viewer of the show. Since this is my blog post, I am choosing to ignore it.

Final Score:

• Bride needs a dress in under 2 months – +7 points
• Nightmare bridesmaid – +4 points
• Manager intervention – +5 points
• Bride has a “bridal moment” – +5 points for Kim, +5 for Christine
• Bride wears a different?? dress?? to her wedding?? – minus 3 points
• Entourage of 5 or more people – +3 points

Total: 26/100

See you guys next time. Bye beautiful!