‘Virgin River’: Behind the scenes at Mel and Jack’s big wedding

How long can you date someone before you hear wedding bells? It’s an age-old question with differing opinions. On “Virgin River,” it took six seasons and 64 episodes.

The Netflix romance drama concluded its now-streaming sixth season with the long-awaited 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 where time moves at a glacial pace – the first five seasons of the series take place within a year – the fictional couple, played by Alexandra Breckenridge and Martin Henderson, managed to make it down the aisle despite lasting twists that would have had married couples exchanging some awkward breakup texts. Over the course of the show, they have been kidnapped by illegal pot farmers; learned that Jack was the father of twins from his ex – until it turned out to be a lie; Mel has been robbed at knife point, while Jack has been shot; later, when they finally get on the same page about having children and waiting, they are dealt a blow when Mel suffers a miscarriage.

They had the “for better or 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 been wanting this moment for so long. Look, it’s a romance novel. So aside from hot, steamy sex, what does an audience want? They want eternal love, marriage and family and everything in the happy ending. I think we had a good balance between dragging it out long enough and teasing the audience long enough.”

“This is 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 takes place in a charming small town in Northern California and revolves around the courtship of a nurse who, after the death of her husband, leaves her life in LA 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,” it’s been a joyous experience to show that a second chance at love at a different time in life is possible.

“Those stories are so much richer than just the purity of first love,” he said. “There are several nuances to it.”

Mel and Jack get married early in the second book with less fanfare than what plays out on screen. In the show, their mixed-up but well-meaning friend Hope McCrea (Annette O’Toole), who is the town’s mayor, persuades the couple to let her plan the event – a means for the show’s writers to create a slightly more complicated affair than a simple adaptation of the couple’s style. There are ice sculptures at this rustic wedding.

“I felt that if I had stayed true to the book, where Mel and Jack got married in his parents’ backyard in Sacramento, I would have had 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 telling her what happened and she was just so excited that we were going to make it a big event. It just felt like going six seasons and building up 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 designer Mecca Thornhill put it this way: “Everybody has a different version of what Mel and Jack’s wedding should look like.”

“We wanted it to be Pinterest-friendly,” Smith said. “We knew we wanted a cozy feel. We wanted a farm feel. We knew we wanted something in nature, which given the amount of time we were shooting in Vancouver, was low-key. And we just got lucky . It was a beautiful day. I was praying to Taylor Swift, and that’s what happens when you pray to Taylor.”

Although it was a significant affair, whole the city was not there. The fictional community is said to have a population of about 600 people, but only 120 chairs were purchased for the ceremony, according to Tony Devenyi, the show’s production designer. Four or five ice sculptures were ordered. And being prepared for the unexpected was something they had to consider for the location. The original wedding location was located some distance outside of Vancouver, where the show is primarily filmed, but concerns about the limited options for filming if the unpredictable weather in June interfered, led 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 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 so that people (felt) they could actually achieve this if they got together — they could do these things without it being some kind of Hollywood wedding .”

The pressure extended beyond the aesthetics of the wedding. Smith knew he had to deliver breathtaking bits of romance – like the moment when, just as the ceremony was about to begin, the couple galloped on horseback to revisit the river’s edge that had been the backdrop to the beginning of their relationship or their mail. -ceremony coitus under the glow of fire in their cabin.

“Taking it back to the beginning was what I always wanted to do from the start of the season,” Smith said. “It was kind 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 of preparing the cabin is that this is what most honeymoon suites look like on a daily basis. So to be like, what do we add to that? And they said no to that. There’s no ice sculptures in the cabin and all that.”

It all worked effectively for Henderson.

“When she (Breckenridge as Mel) finally comes 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 in the last ende traded in his tux for his navy uniform for the ceremony. “I couldn’t help but feel everything that the characters have been through during the seasons, how much they meant to each other. I forgot to take my hat off like I was supposed to because I was pretty caught up in it all.”

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, prompting Henderson to repeat times to stumble on what 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 cope with the cold temperatures. “I wanted to jump out of the dress; the wardrobe women would come and zip it up. And I wanted to wear these ridiculous things. It looks like I’m naked, but I’m not. And I would bop around in Uggs. People looked at me. They were so scared because they thought I was just running around naked.”

The shrug Mel wears over her 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 more familiar to the broadcast TV model, with the wedding spanning the final two episodes of the season. The 10 episodes of season 6 take place over three weeks leading up to the wedding. Smith said there was no debate about whether we should postpone the wedding any further.

“I didn’t want to do it personally to the fans,” he said. “I think you risk erosion and you can only dangle the carrot for so long. I also didn’t want to get to the point 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, this meant opening up the possibility of adopting the child of one of Mel’s pregnant patients.

“As we look at Season 7, we’re trying to find new dynamics in Mel and Jack’s relationship that feel different now that they’re married, to emphasize that marriage matters,” Smith said. “Sometimes in TV shows it’s a prop where you just wear a wedding ring.”