Pat Bullard Hosts 'Here Come the Newlyweds'

If anyone's an expert on relationships gone wrong, it would be Pat Bullard.I refer here not to his personal life – though he is on his second marriage, which has so far lasted 10 blissful years. Nor even to his single season replacing Chuck Woolery as the host of Love Connection.Here Come the Newlyweds, a show that's half Survivor and half The Newlywed Game, features seven newly married couples competing for a large cash prize in a series of challenges (like wives guiding blind-folded hubbies into parallel parking spots).

Besides getting to know all seven couples, you'll get to see some familiar and beloved Dancing with the Stars personalities, as Elena Grinenko and Tony Dovolani teach the newlyweds to tango and Carrie Ann Inaba judges their performances. Pat Bullard hosts the charming and addictive new show, which premieres at 10:02 pm/ET on ABC on March 2.But he has also had less easygoing experiences in television, and they very much inform his current TV hosting gig, Here Come the Newlyweds (tonight at 10 on ABC and Citytv). It's a cross between Big Brother and The Newlywed Game, putting seven competing, newly-nuptial'd couples together in one house and watching the sparks fly.

Or not – Bullard insists that, even under duress, the couples for the most part got along quite well, with each other and with their respective new spouses."It was really a lot of fun," he says. "There was one interracial couple – he was from Germany and he was an atheist, and his wife was from the South and her father was a Baptist minister. There's a Muslim couple in an arranged marriage, very happily married. Another couple ... had only even known each other nine months.A sitcom writer/producer of note, Bullard has worked with and for two of the most volatile, demanding and infamously erratic women in television history, Roseanne Barr and Brett Butler. And also one of the nicest, sweetest and most accommodating, country singer turned sitcom star Reba McEntire.