Scenes From A Marriage - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

David Jacobs, series creator of Dallas and Knots Landing, based the latter series on Scenes from a Marriage. The series focused on four married couples whose marriages were in various stages: the newlywed couple, the ideal couple, the couple whose marriage was in trouble, and the couple that recently reconciled. The series ran from 1979-1993.

In the 1984 SCTV skit/commercial parody "Scenes from an Idiot's Marriage", Martin Short plays Jerry Lewis playing a writer who goes through a comedic version of what goes on in Scenes from a Marriage, complete with Lewis's pratfalls and constant mistakes in pronunciation of Swedish names (he constantly mistakes the name Sven Gunderbloom as Sy Worthenson when his wife (Andrea Martin) announces that she is divorcing him and giving him Gunderbloom's name as her lawyer) and his later pratfalls serving drinks at a dinner party when he gets carried away with using a seltzer bottle, spraying the water everyplace.

In 1991, Woody Allen co-starred in Paul Mazursky's Scenes from a Mall, a dark comedy about a marriage falling apart.

Woody Allen's similarly realist film Husbands and Wives (1992) includes several nods to Scenes from a Marriage, including a wife who will not show her poetry to her husband.

In an April 2011 New York Times Opinionator article, titled "Too Much Relationship Vérité", Virginia Heffernan compares An American Family to Scenes from a Marriage:

It’s now the future. And the 12-hour PBS time capsule, which will make a rare reappearance next week at the Paley Center in Manhattan and on some public-TV affiliates beginning Saturday, looks more like performance art than social science. Hammy stunts for the camera alternate with Bergmanesque staging. (“Scenes from a Marriage,” Bergman’s fiction TV series, also appeared in 1973, in Sweden.)