It was the unlikely coupling of Danielle Mullins, a 41-year-old home health care aide from Ohio, and Mohamed Jbali, a 26-year-old from Tunisia, that launched TLC’s reality show “90 Day Fiancé” into the pop culture stratosphere.
Never before had a romance like this been seen on television. Here was a couple who met and courted online, a much older woman sure that her younger boyfriend was The One — despite never having been in the same room, let alone the same country. The couple wed just five months later, with the groom claiming he couldn’t kiss his bride because it went against his religion.
A small gathering of guests cringed. So did viewers at home.
Danielle and Mohamed were just one of multiple romances chronicled in their 2014 season, the show’s second, but they were the breakout stars. Viewers couldn’t get enough of their story, which played out in wild and unpredictable ways.
To hear the show’s premise is to think you know how each relationship plays out: Well-to-do, older Americans search online for young, hot singles from impoverished nations. There is usually a significant imbalance in looks and weight, not to mention cultural and religious norms. Some couples don’t even speak each other’s language and communicate solely through Google Translate.
What seems clear is that the younger foreigners are using the older Americans for a green card, with the trusting Americans unaware they’re being scammed and humiliated on national TV. And with just 90 days to spend in America — at which point the couple either marries or the foreigner must go home — the chances that the American gets duped increase exponentially.
Right?
That’s how Danielle’s storyline began. Then Mohamed moved to her small town in Ohio, and it became clear that he wasn’t necessarily a villain. With the expert pacing of a psychological horror movie, the show revealed Danielle as needy, clingy and a queen of passive-aggressiveness.
She lived in a cramped suburban apartment and kept that a secret, knowing Mohamed expected the America of Hollywood. She also had a lot of debt — yet another thing she hid from Mohamed, until their cell phones got shut off.
When Mohamed realized what he’d signed up for — having traveled to live with Danielle and her three teenage daughters, unable to work himself because the U.S. government doesn’t issue work visas in these cases, no friends or family here, no outside support or social network — the show’s brilliant plot twists kicked in: Just who is using who? Who has pure intentions and who is purely interested in a transaction? And why do so many sad-sack middle-aged American men junk audience sympathy by packing sex toys and cheap lingerie for young Eastern European or Southeast Asian women they’ve never met in person?
Add the most improbable love stories, one partner seemingly in the throes of denial, and you have must-see TV.
Take Jenny and Sumit. Jenny is a 62-year-old grandmother from Palm Springs, California, who met 32-year-old Sumit online. Jenny emptied out her 401(k) and gave up her home to relocate to India, where Sumit lives.
She spent most of her time alone in a tiny apartment, tearful and confused.
Sumit, it turned out, had secrets. (Most participants do — it’s a recurring beat.) Sumit had catfished Jenny with a photo of a male model, pretending he was a 25-year-old Londoner.
Also, he was already married.
Guess what? They’re still together! They, too, are a breakout couple of the franchise, returning in the new season of “90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way.”
Not every relationship is as extreme, but for fans, each is a mental exercise in assessing character and motivation.
Mohamed was fairly depicted as a callous philanderer — women began reaching out to him as the show aired, and he often took off on vacations with them — but as he confessed on his season-ending “Tell All,” Danielle practically considered him a sex slave.
In a clip since viewed over 1.4 million times on YouTube, Mohamed said, “We started facing a problem . . . She would be, like, sitting on the floor, cursing, screaming, in front of her teenagers, ‘I WANT MY SEX TONIGHT! IF YOU DON’T GIVE ME MY SEX TONIGHT, I WILL CALL IMMIGRATION! I WILL GET YOU DEPORTED!’”
In that moment, Danielle seemed the epitome of the Ugly American. But consider this clip from the same reunion special, called “Why Did Mohamed Stop Having Sex with Danielle?” now viewed over 4.5 million times.
Danielle: “He has told people that I smell —”
Mohamed: “You do.”
Danielle: “And that I peed on him.”
And thus a rarity among shows in our streaming age, appointment viewing, took hold. And a franchise was born.
Not that long ago, Sunday night programming was considered the height of prestige: Think “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “Breaking Bad,” “Homeland,” “The Good Wife,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Walking Dead,” “Downton Abbey,” “Game of Thrones.” These shows dominated the cultural landscape and attracted highly educated, high-income viewers.
Now Sunday nights belong to TLC’s “90 Day Fiancé” and its spinoffs, some of which bleed into other nights: “Before the 90 Days,” “The Other Way,” “What Now?” “Pillow Talk,” “The Family Chantel,” the hastily pulled together “Self-Quarantined,” “Happily Ever After,” (new season premiering Sunday, June 14), and the just-announced “B90 Strikes Back!” premiering June 22.
What accounts for such a tectonic shift? Part of it has to do with novelty. For a long time, movies were the sole province of antiheroes, stylish cinematography and graphic sex and violence. Then premium cable not only began mimicking movies but surpassing them, unfolding deeper characterizations and storylines than two-hour feature films can contain — until these shows, too, became predictable.
Antiheroes are now a cliché. “90 Day” is about the naïve but human hope that love can conquer all.
And when you consider what’s happened to premium cable dramas of late — “Game of Thrones” inured viewers to plot twists, as with Ned’s beheading or the Red Wedding, then left fans outraged over a rushed and sloppy final season, the showrunners clearly bored and divested — it’s no wonder “90 Day” has become such a phenomenon. No matter how devoted a student you are of documentaries or reality TV, you can never tell what’s going to happen next.
“#90 Day” is consistently among Twitter’s top-five trending topics on Sunday nights. The most recent “Before the 90 Days” reunion, which aired last Sunday, was the most-watched program in America that week. The franchise accounts for one-third of the network’s programming and just keeps adding viewers; right now, it’s averaging 3.5 million watching the day it airs.
Though TLC worries about diluting the brand, quarantine has only intensified the appetite for the show, in part due to its built-in global settings, reminding us of a time when travel was taken for granted.
“I’ve just been watching a lot of ‘90 Day Fiancé,’” Pete Davidson told Howard Stern this week. He joins celebrity superfans such as Lady Gaga, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, Amy Schumer, Sophie Turner and Mindy Kaling.
And this was a show that just about every network exec rejected.
“90 Day” creator Matt Sharp grew up in Syracuse, New York, the son of history professor father and a journalist mother. He got the idea for the show in 2011 after watching a newsmagazine piece about Americans going abroad to meet people they had only previously talked to online.
“There is a big fish-out-of-water element,” Sharp tells The Post. “Plus a natural ticking time clock that increase[s] the pressure on the relationship.”
Sharp also saw a hole in the reality television landscape, dominated by sleeker vehicles he declines to name, “less authentic shows with perfectly placed shots . . . people fighting but [not] register[ing] as authentic.”
The implication is clear: These would be the wealthy, glamorous, exceedingly white and scripted worlds of Bravo’s “Real Housewives” and “Vanderpump Rules.” Nor is “90 Day” a relative of “The Bachelor,” filled as that show is with beautiful people in fairytale settings.
Sharp casts people of different socioeconomic classes, cultures and ethnicities — more often struggling than not —desperate not just for money and fame, but love. Very, very desperate for love.
Take David from this season’s “Before the 90 Days.” At 60 years old, David had spent about $300,000 taking 20-plus trips to Ukraine and declared he was in a committed, seven year-long relationship with Lana, a woman he’d never met.
The cliffhanger: Was Lana real, or an epic catfish?
Turns out she was real, but when she finally met David in Ukraine — having stood him up in Kiev on each of his four previous trips — Lana was visibly disgusted as he pawed and hugged her, moaning every time.
There’s no better summation of David’s delusion than what he reported at the “Tell All:” He and Lana are engaged, but no longer together.
People and stories like this are so plentiful that there’s little danger the franchise will cannibalize itself. Yet Sharp spent almost two years shopping the show and was about to give up when he ran into TLC exec Howard Lee (now president and GM of the channel) in late 2013.
“He had a tape on his iPad and was giving me a verbal pitch,” Lee tells The Post. “I said, ‘Don’t share this with anybody else. I want it.’ It went straight to series.”
Angela Deem, a 59-year-old temperamental, chain-smoking grandmother of six from Hazelhurst, Georgia, is among the recurring characters. She is engaged to Michael Ilesanmi, a Nigerian more than 20 years her junior.
“The first year [on the show] I was humiliating the town, but now they love me,” she tells The Post. Deem says she gets recognized even more in New York City, where she was so mobbed by fans at J.Lo’s Madison Square Garden show last summer that it took half an hour to reach her seat.
“The last time I was [in New York] was right before the epidemic,” she says. “I was in Times Square and heard ‘Angela!’ It was a guy cop and a lady cop. They said, ‘We want a picture with you!’”
Also returning to TLC this month are Debbie and Colt — not a couple, but a mother-son duo who live together, with their six cats, in Las Vegas. When 34-year-old Colt’s Brazilian fiancée Larissa moved in last year, the two women battled for Colt’s affections, creating some of the most uncomfortable and addictive television in recent history.
“I thought I would be in one or two episodes,” Debbie says. “Suddenly I’m shooting eight to 10 hours a day.”
“We were fans,” Colt says. “I thought [the show] would give Larissa something to do while waiting for her work permit.”
Former tech worker Colt, 34, has — like tens of millions of Americans — recently lost his job due to the pandemic. The show has been something of a salve.
“I think we’re kind of relatable,” Colt says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re foreign or domestic — everyone can relate to the conflict.”
“Getting recognized always surprises me,” Debbie says. “That people want a picture with me.”
Colt and Debbie are currently not filming, and they don’t know if or when they’ll be back. So what’s next?
“Who knows?” Colt says, laughing. After “90 Days” stardom, “the sky’s the limit.”