For the life of me, I cannot name a single Jessica Simpson or Nick Lachey song. That hardly detracts from Newlyweds, which is less about music than sniping, whining, passive-aggressive jockeying, emotional blackmail, character assassination, dumb-blonde jokes and the foibles of new money. If Nick and Jessica didn't spend their time performing sub-Britney and -Justin vanilla R&B aerobics anthems, they'd be the perfect leads in a Gen-Y remake of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. (Even the way they load the word "baby" with gun powder before lobbing it at each other makes them heirs to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's George and Martha.)
   Marital sparring is a recurring theme. Nick condescends to Jessica by explaining that a Chicken of the Sea tin contains fish, not chicken. Jessica spends $700 on underwear after Nick flirts with his back-up dancers. Nick tells Jessica that Nancy O'Dell of Access Hollywood is his "new favorite woman," to which Jessica can only muster a petulant pout. While Nick wipes up spills in the kitchen, Jessica boasts that she's lived in hotel rooms since she was fourteen and thus has no idea how to do laundry or clean. Nick tells a friend that he has a "five-year plan to get all the spoiledness" out of Jessica. Like nails on the blackboard, these are the days of their lives.
   As if watching these two interact in their marble-inlaid McMansion didn't prove Jean-Paul Sartre's dictum that hell is other people, the producers allow hangers-on (the aforementioned dancers, Nick's brother, Jessica's mom, battalions of stylists and choreographers) to impede upon Nick and Jessica's marital bliss. But the presence of others hardly affects these natural-born exhibitionists. Nick will infantilize and humiliate Jessica no matter who is around. And Jessica, well, let's just say she'd ruin a funeral because she's having a bad hair day.
   Strip away the newlyweds' bleached hair, feng shui'd mansion, record deals and $700 underwear and what you get is a portrait of a young marriage in trouble. When couples rush to the altar at such a young age, when partners have no experience living with each other, they're bound to snipe and bicker. Throw in a camera crew, add MTV's patented editing and music cues, and what you have isn't so much a TV series but a case study in codependence.
    Nick and Jessica stimulates the same sharp taste of schadenfreude as the wedding announcements in the Sunday New York Times: We know that those bright young things won't last, no matter how many china sets they registered for or how many around-the-world trips they take. Likewise, Nick and Jessica are kids, barely out of adolescence, awash in dumb money, surrounded by coddlers and future National Enquirer tipsters. If bona fide grown ups who don't have the benefit of "celebrity maids" (which Jessica whiningly requested in episode two) can't make a marriage work, how can Nick and Jessica? The saddest thing will be that when they do split up, the show may have already been cancelled and we'll miss it.
   You gotta hand it to MTV: the programming department is incredibly crafty to use Nick and Jessica in this way. The network's window for showing actual videos has narrowed to about one hour a day, when Carson Daly (or one of his gene-spliced, undead clones) hosts TRL. So to make nice with the record labels that keep MTV afloat, concessions have to be made to the "artists." You can't call yourself Music Television if the only thing you show is The Real World and The Big Urban Myth Show: you have to figure out how to marry music with programming. That's why MTV features shows about musicians that sorta, kinda features their music, but mostly features their perfectly white caps, flat screen TVs, and their complete inability to change the garbage bags in the kitchen.
   With The Osbournes, Making the Band II (which features P-Diddy as the worst boss you never had), Cribs, Punk'd and now Newlyweds, MTV has not only invented a better mousetrap but baited it with irresistible cheese. And in the case of Nick and Jessica, well, let's just say they ain't the sharpest cheeses on the platter.