Dear Marry Me: It’s almost time for a divorce.

When the Fall TV season started up in September, Marry Me was one of the few new shows I was really amped for. Created by David Caspe (Happy Endings), the show stars Casey Wilson (!) and Ken Marino (!!) as a recently engaged couple who are, more or less, batshit crazy, but not in the quirky, off-beat way we want them to be. Annie is high-strung and over-thinks everything, while Jake is the easy-going, lollygagging, buffoony husband-to-be. (Already sound cliche?)

In the pilot, we see the two face a series of misunderstandings and ominous signs all leading up to their engagement. Despite what could’ve been a terrible Rom-Com outing, the pilot was engaging and enticing, foreshadowing a series with that same Happy Endings quirk – one that’s about love, but not with a hackneyed Kate Hudson-movie approach. It felt fresh. Since its promising pilot, Annie and Jake have become the cliches the show should have been working overtime to avoid, with Annie becoming more and more like the cuckoo-nutso bride-to-be that you’ve already unfollowed on Facebook, while Jake being a doofy, lovable guy struggling to read his fiance’s facial expressions and cues.

It’s like watching your best friend’s dumb relationship and wanting to shake the shit out of both of them after a good slapping.

Personally, I don’t even know how the duo’s friends can stomache them, but they’re also riddled with problems. Do Gil, Kay and Dennah have lives of their own besides getting wrapped up in Annie and Jake’s DRAAAAA-MAAAAA!? Marry Me would be a stronger show if it was more of an ensemble and less of The Annie and Jake Show, with an audience of friends watching and commenting on their every move. (It might even make Annie and Jake less annoying. I digress.)

Marry Me does have fleeting moments of genius, though. It’s great at figuring out these microscopic relationship issues that are so real and true to life that it’ll have most couples exclaiming: “That’s totally us.” But it’s how the show executes those plot points that makes the entire show trite and very “Network TV.” (Spoiler alert: Jake’s to blame. Annie’s insecure. Yada, yada, yada…)

I wish Marry Me would maintain its eye for relationship intricacies, but parody the issues it’s spotlighting. Let the characters be faulted, but in an over-the-top we-KNOW-they’re-sort-of-terrible way. That angle would really take the [wedding] cake. Because in real life, relationships do make us crazy. Marry Me doesn’t need to hide from that truth or make excuses as to why Annie and Jake are bugging out in cheap attempts to make sure we still like them. We’ve all been there, so let’s keep it real.

Making the show a relationship satire would be a sharper choice that doesn’t necessarily have to forgo heart or characterization. We could still follow Annie and Jake on their journey toward the aisle, but instead, maybe we wouldn’t feel so alienated by cookie cutter stories about the guy trying to hide something and the girl not getting along with his mother.

Or maybe this is a series that simply could’ve fared better on cable. I’ll take Married over Marry Me any day.