FIANCE RISES ABOVE GENRE
Reality show a rarity: It’s good
It’s hard when you fall in love with someone from another country, but it’s even harder these days when you fall in love with a reality TV show.
You’ll hear no end of it from your friends and family, and, if you happen to be a television critic, your readers: “That show is just using you,” they’ll say. “Whatever that show is telling you isn’t really the truth. They’re just faking it.”
I’m as skeptical as I can be about reality TV — I throw away press releases and screeners for “unscripted” shows by the truckload — but I like to keep my mind and my heart open to the remote possibility that the old magic will return. It’s a mistake, I think, to lump all reality TV shows together and pronounce them worthless filth.
Many reality shows are not just desperate bids for attention by quasi-celebrities. Some reality shows are not here to launch stagy affronts to documentary ethics; a precious few aren’t only trying to get your goat or yank your chain (the term of art now is “trolling”). A good reality show — that rare thing — is primarily concerned with showing us how other people live. And that’s a subject that should never grow tiresome to anyone with a basic sense of curiosity or empathy.
TLC’s fascinating 90 Day Fiancé, for example, is a show that sounds terrible to those who would never deign to watch it, yet it has become a quietly revealing and even emotional experience for those of us who can’t look away.
Currently in its second season on Sunday nights, 90 Day Fiancé follows six engaged couples who are trying to decide whether to get married. One half of each couple holds American citizenship; the other is from another country (in this season, they hail from Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines, Colombia, Tunisia and Nicaragua) and has been granted entry on a K-1 visa that allows fiancés and fiancées of U.S. citizens to live here for 90 days while the couple work out the details of their relationship.
Marriage is the goal here (leading to permanent residency), but it’s far from guaranteed. In a few cases, the couples in 90 Day Fiancé met online, and the arrival of the foreigner is the first time they’ve seen one another beyond Skype. In other cases, the couples met in a foreign country and are trying to make the relationship work on the Americans’ home turf.
A dark cloud of doubt drifts over the whole show: Are they really in love? (What is love anyhow, and does it matter?) Can this work? (Can any relationship work?) Friends and relatives circle around with taunts of “green card,” suspicions of opportunism and occasional vibes of xenophobia and racism.
As with most immigration law, the burdens of proof are entirely on the outsider. Brett, a 31-yearold divorced man in Snohomish, Washington, brings his 29-year-old Filipina fiancée, Daya, to the house he shares with two roommates. Daya doesn’t hide her disappointment in the flowers Brett brings to greet her at the airport or in the ordinariness of his home. Presented with an engagement ring, she notices a speck in the diamond and insists on an independent appraisal. Brett’s friends and family are, to say the least, unimpressed.
But 90 Day Fiancé is not merely one more exploration of the mailorder bride scenario; in fact, the couples here appear to be genuine, giving it their best shots. Daya’s diamond turned out to be real, and her attitude has made a remarkable shift as this season progressed, particularly when she attempted to bond with Brett’s young daughter all summer and cried genuine tears when it was time for the girl to return to her mother.
There are bigger diva problems on the other side of the country, in Spring Hill, Florida, when 23-yearold Cassia comes from Brazil to live with her fiancé, 38-year-old Jason — and his father. Expecting to arrive in an urban, vibrant America (where she hopes to become a famous swimsuit model), Cassia soon realizes that she’s essentially living in a retirement community where dinner is the early-bird spe- cial at an all-you-can-eat salad bar and that her future husband makes his living selling memorabilia on eBay.
What I like about 90 Day Fiancé is its unflinching commitment to this kind of middle-American awkwardness — which we often fawn over in scripted, half-hour comedies such as Parks and Recreation and then tend to deplore in real-life settings. In this show, the milk-and-honey promises of the American dream quickly give way to the banality of real life and lowered expectations.
90 Day Fiancé is filled with what I consider to be the true treasures to be found in reality TV: messy rooms of average decor, dented cars, high-carb diets, curious pastimes and people sitting around a lot.
It’s an armchair anthropologist’s delight; how can these men and women learn to reconcile their love (or infatuation) with their cultural differences?