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“Even if marriage doesn’t last a lifetime, a sentence for first degree murder will.”

Court TV (now truTV), harbinger of shows like “Most Shocking (fill in the blank)” and guilty pleasure of true crime loving housewives everywhere has brought us a delightfully awful and wickedly macabre show called ’Till Death Do Us Part.

Hosted by a Vincent Price channeling John Waters, season one of ’Till Death Do Us Part is thirteen half-hour episodes long. Though each episode is based on a true crime wherein a husband and wife go from wedded bliss to murderously amiss, they are re-enacted with wonderfully over-the-top acting. John Waters, who plays “The Groom Reaper” leads us through each episode, offering up commentary chock-full of his famously dry wit.

Each episode tells the same tale: a man and woman get married (and oh! ugly wedding dresses abound), only to find themselves in a less-than-ideal situation a few years down the road, and looking to make a quick escape. The audience is always left guessing who will end up dead until the last possible minute, and the writers seem to delight in planting red herrings. But a murder must always occur, if only so the audience can see the villain’s comeuppance. Every bad guy is caught, and every episode ends with prison jokes aplenty.

The show is the very definition of guilty pleasure. Upon receiving this DVD set (which has lovely packaging, down to blood spatter inside the case) I watched an exploratory episode, followed by another and then another until I found, much to my surprise, that I had watched the whole thing in one sitting. Waters is hilarious, and the stories, which are meant to be every bit as funny as they are criminal, kept me laughing (especially the clown episode. You just can’t go wrong with a clown episode). There are gags in the dialogue, in the staging, and some of these stories are so funny in the sheer stupidity of the criminals that they begged to be made into a television show. Ripe with gallows humor, ’Till Death Do Us Part is wickedly bad, and therein lies its beauty.

Though not the best show around, it is very amusing. The DVD set comes with interviews with the show’s main players (and John Waters manages to crack up his interviewer – her guffaws can clearly be heard while he’s speaking). If there is any justice in the world, another season will be in the works shortly, if it isn’t already.

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