IES Abroad: How did your study abroad experience in Paris contribute to your career path in reality TV, specifically as a showrunner on 90 Day Fiancé?
David Bresenham (DB): Studying abroad helped me realize how much I love exploring cultures that are new to me and finding common ground with people who’ve had vastly different experiences from my own. Paris was amazing for that, and I also had the opportunity to take lots of side trips through Western and Eastern Europe just after the Iron Curtain fell. It was a wonderful time to have adventures and explore, and it planted a seed in my mind that it would be pretty cool to do that for a career. On a practical level, Paris also has a ton of little movie theaters playing classic French and American films—I saw as many of those as I could and traveled to the Cannes Film Festival to see some awesomely weird and inspiring movies.
IES Abroad: Can you share more about the reality side of reality TV, especially in the context of 90 Day Fiancé? How do you manage expectations for intercultural experiences, and how does your study abroad experience play a role in this?
DB: There are reality TV shows that are largely faked, where producers outline a story for every episode before you ever start filming, and then you try to direct non-actors to perform improv as believably as possible. I much prefer shows like 90 Day Fiancé, where the subject matter has naturally high stakes—couples who are in love but often haven’t spent much time together, don’t know each other that well, and are living together for (usually) the first time, with just 90 days to get married or the non-American has to leave the country—and the goal is to document what is real. The real challenge as a producer on a show like 90 Day Fiancé is trying to anticipate what may occur, then doing your best to make sure cameras are around when the cast has important discussions. To make good educated guesses, you need to get to know cast members as individuals and hopefully build their trust, and having a sense of (and interest in) their cultural background is a big part of that. When I was an IES Abroad student studying in Paris and traveling in Europe, I learned how to get to know people from diverse cultures quickly, and that’s been a big asset working on shows that film internationally.
IES Abroad: What led you to transition from being a lawyer to studying film, and how did your educational background shape your role in reality TV?
DB: This was a wildly indirect route, but my plan going into law school was to get my JD, practice law for a few years, and then attend film school. I wanted to get some life experience before starting film school…which was a big relief to my parents, who were eager for me to have a backup in case a career in entertainment didn’t work out! As an attorney, I started working in banking and securities law, then moved to entertainment law. While that entertainment law experience has certainly come in handy at times, more often my legal education generally has helped me in reality TV indirectly—it taught me how to analyze complex situations, break big problems down into smaller solvable ones, and be persuasive.
IES Abroad: Given the success of 90 Day Fiancé, one of the most-watched shows on cable, how do you perceive its impact on Americans' perspectives toward travel and their views of different people and cultures?
DB: I like to think 90 Day Fiancé has had a net positive effect. The show focuses on whether two people from different countries, who for the most part have spent relatively little time together, can learn to trust each other enough to get married within three months. Anything that makes one half of a couple (and the audience) question the other’s motivations ends up being an interesting story, so at times the show can linger on an American’s fears that her/his partner may be more interested in a green card than in love. But that’s never the only doubt a couple has to overcome, and questions always arise as to whether the American is in the relationship for the right reasons, too. On the plus side, 90 Day Fiancé showcases for the audience the diverse foreign countries and cultures of its cast, and each season the audience gains insight into the challenges immigrants to the U.S. can face when leaving their home countries and loved ones. And I think recent seasons have done an especially nice job of presenting the immigrating halves of couples as complex individuals with a variety of feelings and motivations...just like their American partners.
IES Abroad: In your opinion, are there 90 Day Fiancé couples that exemplify increased intercultural competency, comfort with ambiguity, language learning, and openness to new experiences? Conversely, are there couples that may not showcase these skills well? How do you think these skills affect their relationships and the show itself?
DB: Absolutely—sometimes with 90 Day couples, both halves are open to their partner’s culture, and together they find ways to combine the best of both worlds. Other times, one partner refuses to learn the other’s language or culture and tries to steamroll them into abandoning their culture. There have been a few American cast members who gained a following by behaving incredibly offensively to their partners and their cultures, but by and large the most popular couples have found ways to adapt to each other and one another’s cultures. Which makes sense—whether they’re being scrutinized on reality TV or not, relationships that don’t involve communication and compromise tend not to work out so well.
IES Abroad: As a showrunner, were you able to decide what content to produce for 90 Day Fiancé? What factors influenced your decision-making process in creating compelling and engaging episodes?
DB: There are a lot of people, at the network and the production company, involved in the decision making—especially on a successful show like 90 Day Fiancé. But a key part of showrunning production involves having initial one-on-one conversations with cast members in order to discover what kinds of storylines are most likely to arise, then advocating to use budgetary resources to focus on the ones you find most interesting. Sadly, very few shows can afford to film cast 24/7, so the choice of when to film and what conversations to encourage the cast to have definitely can influence what ends up airing. On 90 Day Fiancé, it was fun exploring where two partners were on the same page and where they weren’t, especially when the differences were due to the more unique aspects of their contrasting cultures.
