The Mail Order Bride Industry Is Anything But Funny

By Marivi Soliven

In September, NBC announced it had put into development a new half-hour sitcom, Mail Order Family, featuring this “comedic” premise: Lonely American widower buys Filipina mail order bride to raise his preteen daughters. Much laughter ensues.

Barely 72 hours later, amid furious protests from the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition, bloggers, and multiple online petitions, NBC announced it was canceling the project.

If there’s one good thing to come from this fiasco, it’s the fostering of a much-needed conversation about the mail order bride industry. While satire can certainly serve as potent social commentary — Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Natural Born Killers spring to mind, for example — due to the sexual and physical violence that can occur in these exchanges, to say nothing of exploitation, it’s hard to imagine making this premise palpable with a patina of guffaws.

In the aftermath of the show’s cancellation, it’s worth asking: What’s the status of the real-life source material for this television controversy? And how was a comedy about human trafficking ever green-lit in the first place?

Inside The Mail Order Bride Industry

Mail order brides have been coming to the United States for over a century. A…