How long into dating someone before you hear wedding bells? It’s an age-old question with varying opinions. On “Virgin River,” it took six seasons and 64 episodes.
The Netflix romance drama capped its sixth season, now streaming, with the long-anticipated wedding of Mel Monroe and Jack Sheridan, the show’s central couple whose relationship unapologetically leans into its escapist fantasy rubric. And what better time for viewers to be reminded to celebrate love than in a festive haze of last-minute gift shopping and financial stress?
For a show in which time moves at a glacial pace — the first five seasons of the series take place within the span of about a year —the fictional couple, as played by Alexandra Breckenridge and Martin Henderson, managed to make it down the aisle despite enduring twists and turns that would have caused real-life couples to exchange some awkward breakup texts. Over the run of the show, they’ve have been kidnapped by illegal pot farmers; learned Jack was fathering twins by his ex — until it turned out to be a lie; Mel has been robbed at knife point, while Jack has been shot; later, once they finally get on the same page about having kids and are expecting, they’re dealt a blow when Mel suffers a miscarriage.
They had the “for better, for worse” part of their commitment locked down, to say the least.
“My reaction was, ‘good, about time!’ ” Henderson said in a recent video call. “I feel like the audience has wanted this moment for so long. Look, it’s a romance novel. So aside from hot, steamy sex, what does an audience want? They want everlasting love, marriage and family and all of the happy ending. I think we walked a good balance of dragging that out long enough and teasing the audience long enough.”
“It’s the moment people have been waiting for since they started watching it,” Breckenridge said.
Based on the bestselling book series by Robin Carr, the drama is set in a charming small town in Northern California and revolves around the courtship between a nurse, who after the death of her husband, leaves behind her life in L.A. to start a new chapter, and a veteran who owns the town’s popular bar. For showrunner and executive producer Patrick Sean Smith, who started his career in the young adult space on shows like “Summerland” and “Greek,” showing that a second chance at love at a different stage in life is possible has been a gratifying experience.
“Those stories are so much richer than just the purity of the first love,” he said. “There’s more nuance in it.”
Mel and Jack get married early in the second book with less fanfare than what plays out on the screen. In the show, their meddling but well-intentioned friend Hope McCrea (Annette O’Toole), who is the town’s mayor, persuades the couple into letting her plan the event — it’s a means for the show’s writers to throw a slightly more elaborate affair than a simple one fitting of the pair’s style. There are ice sculptures at this rustic wedding.
“I felt like if I had stayed true to the book with Mel and Jack getting married in his parents’ backyard in Sacramento, I would have to make sure my home was unlisted because they [fans] would have come for me and my family,” Smith said. “It felt reasonable to deviate. I had the pleasure of talking to Robin Carr and letting her know what was happening, and she was just so excited that we were going to make it a big event. It just felt like to go six seasons and build to this epic milestone for this couple, that had to be big.”
The show’s creative team felt the pressure of fan expectations. Smith said the show’s set decorator Mecca Thornhill put it this way: “Everybody has in their mind a different version of what Mel and Jack’s wedding should look like.”
“We wanted it to be Pinterest-able,” Smith said. “We knew we wanted a cozy vibe. We wanted a farm vibe. We knew we wanted something in nature, which given the time period in which we were shooting in Vancouver, it was dicey. And we just got lucky. It was a beautiful day. I told everybody I prayed to Taylor Swift and that’s what happens when you pray to Taylor. She makes it happen.”
While it was a sizable affair, the whole town wasn’t there. The fictional community is said to have a population of about 600 people, but just 120 chairs were purchased for the ceremony, according to Tony Devenyi, the show’s production designer. Four or five ice sculptures were commissioned. And being prepared for the unexpected was something they had to consider for the location. The original wedding site was quite a ways outside Vancouver, where the show is primarily filmed, but concerns about the limited options for pivoting in case the unpredictable June weather interfered prompted them to move the location three or four days before filming took place.
“Virgin River already has a style and a feel and a vibe to it that we really wanted to make sure was very rich in the wedding,” Devenyi said. “It’s still a small town vibe. We always wanted to make it that people [felt] they could actually achieve this if they got together — they could pull these things off without it being some kind of Hollywood wedding.”
The pressure extended beyond the aesthetics of the wedding. Smith knew he had to deliver breath-hitching bits of romance — like the moment when, just as the ceremony should get underway, the pair gallop by horseback to revisit the river’s edge that had been a backdrop to the start of their relationship or their post-ceremony coitus under the glow of firelight at their cabin.
“Taking it back to the beginning was what I always wanted to do from the start of the season,” Smith said. “That was a bit of our North Star. After so many speed bumps and obstacles, I knew I wanted a moment.”
And the love scene? “It was my ice sculpture,” Smith said. “They have to have ice sculptures and they have to have sex. There has to be mood lighting. We have to have the perfect song. The challenge with preparing the cabin is, it’s what most newlywed suites look like on the daily. So then to be like, what do we add to it? My pitch was ice sculptures. And they said no to that. I was like, ‘OK, fine.’ There are no ice sculptures in the cabin. But we had rose petals and all of that.”
It all worked effectively for Henderson.
“When she [Breckenridge as Mel] finally does come down the aisle, I was so overcome with emotion from Jack’s perspective, just because this is the woman he’s going to marry that he loves so much” said Henderson, whose character ultimately traded in his tux for his Marine uniform for the ceremony. “I couldn’t help but feel everything that the characters have been through over the seasons, how much they meant to each other. I forgot to take my hat off like I had to because I was quite caught up in the whole thing.”
As in any wedding, the bride’s dress can be both the star and the headache. During Mel and Jack’s first dance — to a song performed by Mel’s father, Everett (John Allen Nelson), which was actually written by Wesley Schultz of the Lumineers for the show — Breckenridge said the dress bustle kept falling, causing Henderson to repeatedly trip on it, which both guess is what prompted the whisper he gives her during the dance.
Breckenridge said she wore fleece-lined leggings that give the illusion of skin under her wedding dress to deal with the cold temperatures. “I would pop out of the dress; the wardrobe women would come and unzip it. And I’d have these ridiculous things on. It looks like I’m naked, but I’m not. And I would bop around in Uggs. People were looking at me. They were so scared because they thought I was just running around naked.”
The shrug Mel wears over the wedding dress during the reception is actually Breckenridge’s, which she wore at her own wedding: “I had my husband overnight FedEx it to me.”
The two episodes were filmed over 16 days. Smith said he approached it as an event that is more familiar to the broadcast TV model, with the wedding stretching over the final two episodes of the season. The 10 episodes of Season 6 take place over three weeks in the lead-up to the wedding. Smith said there wasn’t a debate about whether to delay the nuptials further.
“I didn’t personally want to do that to the fans,” he said. “I think you run the risk of erosion and you can only dangle the carrot for so long. I also didn’t want to get to the place where the obvious series finale is the inevitability of the wedding.”
In the closing moments of the “Virgin River” season finale, the wedding glow had faded just enough to set up some cliffhangers for next season. For Mel and Jack, that meant setting up the possibility of their adopting the baby of one of Mel’s pregnant patients.
“As we’re looking into Season 7, we’re trying to find new dynamics in Mel and Jack’s relationship that feel different now that they are married, to make the point that marriage matters,” Smith said. “Sometimes in TV shows, it’s a prop, where you just are wearing a wedding ring.”
