After the '90 Day Fiancé' Tell All, Host Shaun Robinson Tells...a Lot

'90 Day Fiancé' host Shaun Robinson

Imagine watching the season-ending, all-secrets-revealed episode of your favorite guilty pleasure reality series, then having the host of the wrap-up show call you personally to talk about it.

How freakin' cool would that be?

Well, it happened to me. Sort of.

My wife Karen has indoctrinated me into the pure voyeuristic joy that is reality TV on TLC. And next to My 600-lb. Life (don't judge), which returns for its sixth season at 8/7c on Wednesday, Jan. 10, the one series we happily rearrange our schedules to watch together is 90 Day Fiancé.

You must have heard of it. The show follows a group of American singles looking for love – and, some might say, hopelessly foolish and naive – who use a unique 90-day visa called a K-1 to bring their foreign fiancés here from homelands around the globe. Once they arrive in the States, the spouses-to-be have three months to get married or they must leave the country. 

Emotional stress, culture shock and suspicious friends and families result, while cynical viewers question the couples' every move from their living rooms and on social media. Every week, the glaring question persists: are the foreigners really in it for love and marriage, or are they merely faking it to gain U.S. citizenship?

The series is wildly successful, drawing at least 2 million viewers a week and spawning multiple spinoff shows like Before the 90 Days. At the end of each season, all the principals gather on a New York soundstage for a concluding interview session and status report on their relationships. (You can watch the most recent "tell all" episode by clicking here.) 

For the past four seasons, that two-hour wrap-up blockbuster has been hosted by the veteran entertainment journalist and beauteous TV personality, Shaun Robinson.

Who, in the spirit of full disclosure, is my first cousin.

So when Shaun called recently to offer holiday wishes and talk about her impending trip home to Detroit, Karen and I couldn't help ourselves.

"Yeah, Yeah, Shaun, great to hear from you," we said over the speakerphone. "Now, tell us about Elizabeth and Andrei! Did Azan ever show up? What is Nicole really like?"

Shaun had to laugh, because she's become used to that reaction. In her 16 years as a fixture on the nationally syndicated daily entertainment series Access Hollywood, she says she never received the public attention she now gets routinely from her once-a-season appearance on 90 Day Fiancé.

"It's like Access Hollywood didn't exist, like I was never there," she marvels. "I was at a bat mitzvah recently and a couple came up to me like, 'Oh, my God, is that you? Is that you? We thought it was, but we weren't sure. Oooh, we've got to ask you about Danielle and Mohamed.'"

Shaun says she typically doesn't have an opportunity to spend much time with the couples prior to the Saturday tapings, which typically last 11 hours, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., and from which only the juiciest portions are broadcast. So her goal is to be deferential to all the couples, giving them the opportunity to share the spotlight and answer the questions millions of Americans are dying to know.

"At the end of the day, they're just average, everyday people looking for love, so you try to be real respectful," she says. "At least one of them is in love and wants to get married, so sometimes there's just an innocence about them.

"Now, you don't always know the motivation of the foreigner, or even the American for that matter, but that's not for me to determine. There are times when I push and push and still don't get anything useable at the end.”

It’s knowing when and how hard to push that makes her role as moderator a challenge, she says. While her job often appears the equivalent of herding cats — sometimes angry, emotional, or love-blind cats –– Shaun likens it more to being a tightrope artist.

"You have to walk a very fine line," she says. "Some viewers may think we go too hard on some of the couples. Others might believe we don't push hard enough. Whichever way you go, somebody's going to be upset.

"I'm not going to change who I am. My goal is not to make anyone on the soft angry or storm off the set, although they may do that anyway. But I've got to stay true to who I am." 

One of the most memorable participants from the show's Season Four would have been delighted never to see or hear Shaun Robinson question him again.

"One day at JFK, I'm walking to baggage claim and I see a guy walking in front of me with a GoPro," Shaun recalls. "I look and I do a double take – it's Mohamed! He was coming back to do the show the second time, he  had just landed and he was documenting everything.

"So I walk over and say, 'Hi, Mohamed! Shaun Robinson.' He looks at me and goes, 'You? Are you doing the show? They told me there was going to be a different host.'

Couples like Nicole and Azan Keep Viewers Talking Nationwide. (TLC)

"'Nope. It's me.'

"He goes, 'Well, OK. But you better go easy on me this time.'

"See, here's the thing: they're on the show, but when it's over they realize that it's all real, because they have got to deal with the public and social media when the cameras go off. And social media can be brutal on these people." 

Here are a few realities viewers may be surprised to learn about Shaun's role on this reality-TV special:

• While the couples tell all, Shaun doesn't ask much: virtually none of the questions she poses during the special are her own. Producers script the questions in advance on cue cards, and a director is giving Shaun followup suggestions through her IFB earpiece. "They're in my ear the whole time, like, 'ask this, ask that,'" she says.

• Due to scheduling, when the "tell all" show is taped, the last three regular seson episodes have yet to air. Thus no one involved with the finale can react to viewer queries, from social media or any other means, regarding the couples' final romantic twists and turns.

• Even with its extended, two-hour-plus running time, with 11 hours of raw footage to choose from, editors inevitably have to leave some choice scenes on the cutting-room floor. For example, some viewers wondered on social media why Shaun failed to follow the lead of Nicole's mother and make Nicole reveal how much money she regularly sends to her intended, Azan.

Shaun says she did.

"I kept asking, 'Nicole, how much have you sent him?' and Nicole kept begging her mother, 'don't tell, don't tell...,'" she says. "Finally it became apparent that she wasn't going to say, so we just went on. A lot of the stuff is edited out."

Shaun says she binge-watches the season just before hosting the finale so everything is fresh in her mind. Her mother, Joanne, is a devoted fan and keeps her abreast of the goings-on from week to week. Even Mom tries to ply her for some inside dope.

"She tries to get all the secrets out of me" she says, laughing. "I posted a picture of everybody on the sofa, and she called me and said, 'Oh, it looks like Luis didn't show up.' I told her, 'Let's let that be a surprise.'"

Shaun has been a little busy lately for regular TV viewing. She recently completed an in-depth hourlong interview with former teen idol Corey Feldman to accompany the new Lifetime movie A Tale of Two Coreys, about Feldman's relationship with the late Corey Haim, set to debut at 9 p.m. EST Saturday, Jan. 6. TLC values her work so highly that they also tabbed her to host the "tell all" finale of My Big Fat Fabulous Life later this season, And she is moving into the next phase of her career, behind the camera, as executive producer or producer on a number of projects.

But while she's sitting in the best seat at the 90 Day Fiancé house – in the center of the sofa surrounded by the show's capricious couples – she does form some firsthand impressions. "You get a better sense of them in person, when you're sitting right next to them," she says.

Shaun Robinson: "Ive got to stay true to who I am."

– "Andrei actually was very levelheaded. Elizabeth seems like she definitely does love him. She said she would move to wherever he moves. She seemed like she had her head on straight."

– "Nicole just seems very young and immature."

– "When Luis came out he sat on the other side of the sofa. 'Why don't you want to sit next to Molly?'  I asked. All of a sudden, he can't understand English! I literally asked him four times."

– "The one that just tripped me out — well, a number of tripped me out in one way or another — but David was something else.”

And as to Azan? "OK, first of all, Azan doesn't even want to come to the United States, OK? He's happy over there in Morocco. He could stay in Morocco and not have a job. But when he didn't show up and he didn't call in, she [Nicole] just started boo-hooing."