Keeping Up With the ’90 Day’ Franchise Is an Exercise in Futility

By Emma Chance | TV | October 3, 2023 |

By Emma Chance | TV | October 3, 2023 |

The 90 Day Fiancé franchise has long been the great white hope of reality TV. The formula is seemingly foolproof: take a bunch of sad, lonely people desperate and naive enough to wed a near stranger from the other side of the world, facilitate their meeting, stick cameras in their faces, and see what happens. The only problem is, that really isn’t the formula anymore.

It used to just be 90 Day Fiamcé. Now there’s 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days, 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way, 90 Fiancé: UK, 90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After?, 90 Day Fiancé: Love In Paradise, 90 Day Fiancé: The Single Life, and most recently, 90 Day Fiancé: The Last Resort. That’s not even all of it. There have been spin-offs for individual couples, like The Family Chantel, and there are Pillow Talk shows, where couples from one show watch the other shows and comment on them.

The real kicker? For some reason, most of these shows all air at the same time. Right now, in my queue, there are new episodes of The Other Way, The Last Resort, UK, and Before the 90 Days. It’s reached the point where I can’t keep track of which couples are on which show. Even when I can, there are so many of them that they each only get, like, 5 minutes of screen time per episode, so by the time I see them again a week later, I don’t remember them. I set out trying to write an article about some of the news to come out of the shows lately, but I have in the past few days seen headlines like, “‘90 Day: The Last Resort’ Recap: Kelly and Molly Split and Share a Heartbreaking Goodbye” and “‘90 Day Fiancé Recap: Brandan Proposes But Mary Says She’s Being Forced to Say Yes,” and I genuinely have no idea who these people are.

I get that TLC is basically just the 90 Day network now, but it’s too many shows! They could cut half of them if they just let go of some of the old couples. Last Resort is really just an excuse to keep putting Big Ed and Angela on television, but I think even the most stalwart fans of the franchise would agree that we’ve had enough of Big Ed and Angela.

Anyway, if you want to fall down the rabbit hole, the whole franchise is on Max now. But you’ve been warned.