“Masters of Reception” arrives tonight, with a surprising duo in charge.

This is a reality show about big-deal weddings – ones that need time and money. Producing it (but staying off-camera) are Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, whose own wedding had none of that.
“We had an elopement in Las Vegas,” Ripa said. “Our entire wedding costs $200, including airfare.”
Hey, it worked. They've been married for 13 years, with three kids; by comparison, Jennifer Aniston and Melissa Rivers each had an epic wedding, with divorces five years later.
Still, Ripa says they've wondered about the flip side of the wedding world. “We've been invited to mega-weddings and we're kind of fascinated at how they are made.”
That was spurred one day at a reception in New Jersey. “I excused myself to use the rest room,” Consuelos said. “And I must have taken the wrong door back and I ended up at a different wedding.”
He was there for 15 minutes, he said, before realizing this was the wrong place. That's when he began wondering about the companies that run the giant receptions.
That took them to Robert and Jerry Frungillo, in Verona, N.J. “They literally started in a 15-by-20 (foot) little deli store their parents started,” Consuelos said. “And now it's grown into this huge empire, this wedding empire.”
The brothers now own the Villa at Mountain Lake, which can do simultaneous weddings, plus three other spots. They can do up to 10 weddings a day, sometimes with hot-air balloons, a groom on horseback and a bride in horsedrawn carriage.
They can also deal with detail. Tonight's opener includes finding candy from the Dominican Republic and patching a wedding gown, after the groom stepped on it. It also includes replanting a garden – for a wedding that then had to be moved indoors.
This is done with a sense of calm, Ripa said “Our show, in my opinion, is a love note to New Jersey.”
She grew up in Jersey and started acting early. At 19, she joined the “All My Children” soap opera; Consuelos arrived five years later.
The marriage came the next year. “We knew … we could never have a huge wedding,” Consuelos said.
Others can. They turn to the masters of reception.