TLC’s 90-Day Fiancé Is a Hit Thanks to Spellbinding Acrimony

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Like every successful reality TV show, 90 Day Fiancé begins with an intriguing concept: Can a blossoming romance survive the harsh rigors of the American immigration system? From there, of course, it descends into spellbinding acrimony.

In each hour-and-a-half-long episode, viewers watch as real-life couples navigate the K-1 visa program. Established in 1970, it grants prospective immigrants permanent residency in the U.S. if they marry an American within 90 days of entering the country. If the engagement fails, so does their chance at living the American dream.

The fast track to U.S. citizenship fills the show with tension, misunderstanding, and drama: The hasty timeline baked into the K-1 program adds pressure to the already fraught proceedings of courtship, assimilation, and matrimony. Along the way, lovestruck couples try to convince skeptical families that their engagements aren’t a sham. Protective American parents bristle with accusations of opportunism. Brawls erupt at dinner. Cultural misunderstandings abound.

At a time when ratings are plunging across the traditional television landscape, 90 Day Fiancé, which started in 2014, has grown into a ratings juggernaut for TLC, the cable network owned by Discovery. The seventh season, which wraps on Feb. 17, has averaged 3 million total viewers per episode. (A new season begins on Feb. 23.) Among female viewers, it’s the most popular cable program on Sunday nights.

What started off as a single show has grown into a franchise. Spinoffs include 90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After?, in which TLC checks in on couples previously featured, and 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way, in which Americans move across the globe for the people they love.

The success of the series has returned the network to the prominence it last enjoyed during the 2007-09 heyday of hit reality show Jon & Kate Plus 8. TLC saw a 13% increase in viewership in 2019, the largest bump of any basic cable channel. For the year, it finished as the second-most-popular cable network with women, trailing only Bravo.

The show was created by Sharp Entertainment, a production company known for reality TV shows such as Man v. Food and Doomsday Preppers. To find couples grappling with K-1 issues for the first season, producers scoured forums on VisaJourney.com, a site where people who are struggling with the hazards of the U.S. immigration system congregate.

90 Day Fiancé is a hit at a time when the Trump administration fiercely opposes immigration, and the couples featured on it are becoming rarer. According to a study from the University of Cincinnati, there’s been a notable decline in fiancé visas granted since Donald Trump took office, dropping from an average 33,701 approved applications for fiscal years 2011-15 to 28,662 in fiscal 2018. TLC President Howard Lee says politics is tangential to the show’s success: “I don’t even think about the political angle of what 90 Day Fiancé is about. I think about that universal theme of love.”

Even so, immigration provides much of the drama. During the sixth season, viewers were introduced to Colt Johnson, a computer programmer from Nevada, and Larissa Santos Lima, a social media-savvy Brazilian. After meeting online, the couple rendezvous briefly in Rio de Janeiro, fall in love, and plan to marry hastily so that Lima can move to Las Vegas, where Johnson lives with his mother. The wedding takes place before the clock runs out, but things soon go sour. Lima compares Las Vegas to Mars. Johnson calls the cops on her over alleged domestic violence. (The charges are dismissed.) The couple divorces after seven months.

Still, Johnson and his mom have returned twice to other shows in the franchise. He’s currently hawking items from his days with Lima on celebrity memorabilia site FanBound. An invitation to the couple’s wedding at the Las Vegas Chapel of Flowers is selling for $75.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bret Begun at bbegun@bloomberg.net

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