90 Day Fiancé has become a "vehicle for real-life grief" amid the war in Ukraine

The Washington Post

The hit TLC reality show and its many spinoffs may be trashy, but it's also the most prominent American show to regularly feature Ukrainians. "Despite its obvious contrivances, xenophobic tropes and unrepentant trashiness, the TLC programming pillar has inadvertently become a rather moving medium through which some Americans with no other connection to Eastern Europe have become emotionally invested in the war in Ukraine," says Inkoo Kang, noting that fans have expressed concern for 90 Day Fiancé stars on Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.  "Because so few U.S. programs involve other countries, 90 Day Fiancé may well offer the most consistent Ukrainian presence on mainstream television," Kang adds. "That’s not necessarily a positive, as the franchise tends to play up cultural or ethnic stereotypes much more than it challenges them: Latin American women are portrayed as fiery, Caribbean men as unfaithful and Middle Eastern men as sexually dysfunctional or reactionary. The majority of the Ukrainian women featured on the franchise — among them Alla Ryan (nee Fedoruk) from Season 4 and the mysterious 'Maria' and 'Lana' from Before the 90 Days’s third and fourth seasons, respectively — have been depicted as brutally blunt and unsentimentally practical, if not, as with the latter two, outright scammers. Only Yara Zaya, of the original show’s eighth season, has bucked the trend, coming off as a worldly if spoiled young woman who met her now-husband, Jovi Dufren, on an app for travelers. None of the Ukrainians on 90 Day Fiancé would be considered fan favorites, even for a franchise like this one, where the viewership often rallies around the foreign fraudsters instead of their dopey or entitled American marks...But it probably matters more that the Ukrainians on the show were people we were introduced to in relatively lighthearted contexts."