NBC's new Monday night show, "The Real Wedding Crashers," is a stab at reality-based genius — one that completely and totally misses the mark.

"Wait," you might say. "It says ‘Wedding Crashers.' Shouldn't it be hilarious like the Vince Vaughn movie?" You might think so, and the show's logo invites the comparison, with its font of all capital-red letters that is almost a perfect copy of the movie poster. But the similarities end there.

This isn't even a pseudo-sequel in the form of a television program. "The Real Wedding Crashers" is a reality show, one where a cast of pranksters, designated on-screen as "crashers" (to go along with the oh-so-clever theme), find ways to irritate and disrupt one of the most important days of people's lives.

Call me sadistic, but even that could be funny if done well. After all, a show from the producers of "Punk'd" would surely be able to make the whole thing funny without hurting anyone too badly, but "Crashers" doesn't even try to do that.

The twist in this show is that the bride and groom are in on the joke. The only people being fooled are those in attendance, and unless my personal observations are off, many of those people go to weddings out of obligation (and if you women out there don't believe it, trust me, guys hate weddings).

In the end, the joke only works on people sitting idly in the audience, and since a prank show relies on the reactions of specific individuals to achieve its affect, "The Real Wedding Crashers" lacks any true comic punch.

The pranks themselves aren't even very good. Each episode includes shots from about three different weddings to provide some variety, and the jokes range from a priest answering his cell phone during vows to intentionally catching a wedding dress in a car door.

That's about as epic as it gets. There was nothing in the first episode that caught me off guard or made me recoil at the creators' inventiveness.

As the show draws to a close and the pranks start to die down, the crashers try their best at a dramatic reveal where one of them will grab a microphone and shout to the stunned attendees that their wedding "has been crashed!"

But instead of everyone laughing and slapping each other on the back as often happens in "Punk'd," most people just sit there wondering what's going on, and viewers quickly grow bored. See, the reveals work in "Punk'd" because it deals with celebrities who have an image to protect and are quick to show off how playful they are on camera. But regular people don't care, and the result is a show that falls flat and bores viewers with its lack of intensity.

Granted, "The Real Wedding Crashers" is a fun concept. If it had some genuinely clever ideas and maybe a few cameos from the cast of the movie "Wedding Crashers," it might be worth watching. But for the moment, you'd be better off attending a real wedding than watching this mess.

Listen to an interview with Ashton Kutcher, one of the show's executive producers.