The Best Worst Show on Television is TLC's "90 Day Fiance"
Catfishing for visas and mail-order brides
The greatest show on television is called “90 Day Fiance” and it has outdone all of the rest of the reality dating content on basic cable. This masterpiece is loosely about long-distance couples with one partner who needs to get married in order to move to America. If you’re looking for a thoughtful meditation on the US immigration process or the shortcomings of K-1 visas, you have come to the wrong place. Because 90 Day Fiance is sixty minutes of people drunk fighting with Russian mail-order brides.
Season 4 is currently airing on TLC and centers around a handful of American nationals whose foreign Internet boyfriends and girlfriends have just received K-1 “Fiance” Visas, allowing them onto US soil under the assumption they will get married imminently. Most of the couples are only meeting in person for the first or second time and, per the visa, they now have ninety days to either get married or get deported.
Already this makes for some fun, goofy television, but the stakes here are HIGH. It’s like MTV’s Catfish with wedding ring emojis, but if the other party doesn’t fall for it, their dreams of becoming Playboy models are canceled and they have to go back to pole dancing in Ukraine. I do realize that sounds mean, but it is a real plot point from this show.
But let me stop you before you start to feel sad for these poor, gullible victims of Facebook scams. They include a self-identified anti-feminist who met his fiancée after he harassed her via Facebook comments for months, a car mechanic who mail orders a bride after three American women in a row divorce him, and a woman marrying a polygamist who she knows catfished her for years using a fake Facebook profile (but she’s gonna see it through anyway because he’s a babe).
The crown jewel of this season though, is a couple that consists of a twenty-two-year-old Floridian who is the human embodiment of the laziest stereotypes the rest of the world has about Americans, and her Moroccan fiancé who cannot believe his luck. His visa hasn’t cleared yet, so she goes to Morocco FOR FIVE WEEKS to help convince the U.S. Embassy that their love is for real. It, of course, is not.
Azan, the Moroccan, is a straight up mean-ass misogynist who has found his one-way ticket to the US. He hates everything about his wife-to-be, Nicole, and he is not afraid to say it. He calls her “big” and “lazy” and tells her, with a deep look of despair, that she “really talk much, that’s bad.” Women, he says, are meant to stay in the kitchen while he is hard at work at his job, which would appear to be messaging other American women online, in case a better option comes along. He never plainly admits he is using her, but his dead eyes are nothing short of bone chilling every time he flatly says “I love you, honey” and then literally, physically pushes the greasy pile of French Fries that is his betrothed (his words, basically) away from him.
Meanwhile, Azan’s beloved cannot stop showing off her main personality attribute, which is being the most ignorant, Islamophobic, and all-around dense person to set foot in North Africa. Nicole whines incessantly about everything, from local restaurants serving her vegetables (God forbid) to how deeply unacceptable it is that “there’s a lot different here than it is in America.” An engagement to a Moroccan seems like a bad deal for someone like Nicole, but she wants “that personal trainer body” more than she has ever wanted anything, including spending time with the two-year-old child she left behind in Florida. So she sticks it out. Plus, she reasons, soon he will get to America and sees the error of his foreign, vegetable-eating ways. Throw these two monsters together and you get five weeks of scream fights, slut shaming, borderline racism, and camel rides. In a more self-aware show these two would be fantastic TV villains.
In terms of potential immigrants, TLC has managed to dig up the worst of the worst. There are catfishers from Lagos, gold-diggers from Kiev, womanizers from Marrakech, all here to take our hard-earned American (modeling and acting) jobs. And yet, here these scheming baddies are right alongside the blue-collar Americans who presumably would most resent their presence on American soil. And they’re literally trying to marry each other. Though, to be fair, it’s not going well.
It is deeply distressing but also wildly entertaining television. Hearing a woman earnestly say the phrase “I was catfished by my own fiancé, but I wanna marry him anyway” is honestly worth my entire cable bill. The best reality TV has always been built on the worst people; TLC knows this just as well as Donald Trump does. And I will be glued to my TV until I know when and how all of these idiots meet their disastrous ends.
Chloe Gordon is a film producer and founder of Nighthorse Productions.