Toasts for Royals, Spiked With Scorn

When Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were married in 1981, television viewers behaved like doting, if somewhat nosy, guests.  This time around, they are more like estranged members of the family — steeped in all the dazzle and expense, but not above whispering cattily about the canapés and betting on the happy couple’s chances of divorce.

Diana’s outsize, rock star celebrity cemented the American obsession with the British monarchy, but the fascination has turned ever more jaded even now, when a new and relatively untainted young pair is embarking on a royal fresh start. Television is going deliriously overboard, but after so many decades of telenovela scandal — lurid affairs, nasty divorces, Eurotrash spending sprees, tell-all books, sell-out interviews and, of course, Diana’s fatal car crash in 1997 — there is a marked unwillingness to take this latest royal fairy tale at face value. 

Instead networks are on a giddy, exploitative binge, spewing out shows — “How to Marry a Prince,” “Royal Honeymoon Getaways,” “Say Yes to the Dress: Princess Brides,” “Modern Monarchy Dos & Don’ts” — that rubberneck all things royal, with a knowing leer. Countless networks and Web sites have carved out a niche, like the Food Network and its “Royal Icing Weekend,”  and Investigation Discovery, which plans to honor the Windsor wedding with a daylong marathon of “Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry?” on Saturday, a series devoted to newlyweds who discover that their spouses are bigamists, bank robbers or just big fat liars.

Newscasts keep daily countdowns to the wedding, which is on April 29, and most feature sneering British royal watchers and tabloid reporters. (NBC News offers a royal wedding app.)

Even cable networks like Wedding Central and OWN (Oprah Winfrey’s new channel), which are not especially known for cynicism, put a premium on peeking behind drawn curtains and pointing out the cracks in all that gilt. 

Despite the glut of programming, there is no shortage of would-be royal experts willing to say whatever it takes to get on television, including self-promoting members of the British aristocracy and the blogosphere’s gossip king, Perez Hilton.

“I have heard from friends who have seen them out in a bar or nightclub that she does not leave his side,” Lady Victoria Hervey says on “Kate: The New Diana?,” one of many specials on Wedding Central. 

Lady Victoria, a socialite-turned-reality show performer whom one British tabloid titled “the Was Girl,” adds with a vulpine smile, “She was giving death stares to friends of mine or any girl that came near him, she was like, ‘Block them off.’ ”

In this flood of documentaries, biographies, specials and memorabilia, perhaps the most benign depiction of Prince William and his future bride is in “William & Kate: Let Love Rule,” a Lifetime made-for-television movie that was raced into production after their engagement was announced and will be shown several times before the actual wedding.

The production values are a little shoddy, but Ben Cross (“Chariots of Fire”) does a surprisingly good impersonation of Prince Charles. Nico Evers-Swindell as William and Camilla Luddington as Kate are attractive and almost plausible, even in scenes where Kate, on a hunting trip, tries to win Prince Charles’s approval. (“I think that solar power is the key to our future,” she tells her future father-in-law.) 

It’s their story as told in official interviews and magazines like Hello!, with only a few references to less flattering tabloid reports. (Prince Harry is a bit of a bad boy, but he isn’t shown donning a Nazi uniform for a costume party.)

But even as frothed up by Lifetime, this love story doesn’t have much narrative juice: nobody, not even the queen, seems to mind that Kate is neither royal nor an aristocrat. The two met in college, dated for years, broke up, made up and didn’t get engaged for another three years. “Waitie Katie” isn’t the most romantic appellation; in the Lifetime movie version, the proposal immediately follows their reconciliation.

The real-life couple’s lack of mystery may be fueling some of the scorn. The unhappily-ever-after finale to the gossamer wedding of Charles and Diana left a sour taste. And all those tabloid misadventures of Camilla, Dodi and Fergie cost the royal family a large part of its mystique and even its respectability. The royals have become celebrities that Americans can call their own, but in the New World, people don’t always distinguish the Windsors from other storied dynasties like the Kardashians or the Judds.