Core Post 3-- Michael Feinstein

 In Better Living Through Reality TV Laurie Ouellette and James Hay take up John Hartley’s idea of cultural citizenship and reality television programs as “citizenship games”. However, they depart from Hartley’s ideas on participatory reality programming like American Idol, (what Hartley calls “do-it-yourself” TV), as inherently “empowering” and “democratic” (where democratic specifically means self-governing. Instead, Ouellette and Hay see reality tv as “an objective of governmental rationality” (224). Accordingly, the media citizen created by reality TV is not so much self-created but rather inexorably tied to the structures and ideologies of government. The reality program 90 Day Fiancee, which airs on TLC, and chronicles multiple couples as one of the romantic partners (who has newly arrived in the United States from abroad) gains and lives on a temporary K-1 visa, is a perfect, nearly meta depiction of how reality TV creates citizenship and ultimately promotes a view of that citizenship that is formed by governmental institutions. The K-1 visa that is featured and discussed heavily on the show requires the foreigner who has received it to marry his or her fiancee (who is a US citizen) within ninety days of the visa being issued or they have to vacate the US and lose whatever status of citizenship that the K-1 afforded them. This ninety days, which the US government has (most likely arbitrarily) set as the time limit, gives—as the title would indicate— the entire show its’ structure and form. We begin viewing these international fiancees right around when one of them acquires this temporary citizenship and the season concludes at their marriage that will ultimately lead to a more permanent citizenship to the once-foreign citizen. This program’s format— which has been molded by US immigration policy— creates a literal vision of television creating citizenship. While the show is not technically Do-It-Yourself TV it does, like Ouellette and Hay assert, promote an understanding of citizenship as tied “to the games and experiments of government” (224).  The viewers of 90 Day Fiancee are forced to understand the foreign men and women on the show through this government-sponsored citizenship they are living with and ultimately the show’s rabid fanbase, who discuss the show in depth on reddit (the participatory aspect of the show), end up judging each couple based on who they believe are legitimate—and thus deserving of citizenship by the rules of US immigration policy— and whose citizenship is based on false pretense and thus illegitimate and in need of termination by the US government.   Of course, like most reality TV, the men and women depicted on 90 Day Fiancee are participants in the “theater of suffering” (18) that Anna McCarthy explores in her writing on reality television. In her essay, which built on the connection of reality tv to the concerns neoliberalism that were made by Ouellette and Hay, she cites Lauren Berlant defining a citizen as “a person traumatized by some aspect of life in the United States” (19) and this again is reflected in 90 Day Fiancee as the biggest issues that the tv couples have stem from anxiety over the ninety day time-frame and— most importantly— the fact that the visa stipulates that the foreign fiancee can’t work legally in the US until he is married and thus denying the couple a source of income.  The ugly fights, emotional breakdowns, and traumatic experiences that occur on the show aren’t just “a cartoon version of a crisis in U.S. citizenship”, as Berlant describes some of the affects of neoliberalism, but a literal one directly caused by the temporary citizenship that was issued by the US and stamped by TV.