MTV
Will An Assist From A Concerned Daughter Let Catfish Help Jeanette And Derick Start Their Life Together?
Or has Derick just been putting off driving his forklift over Jeanette's heart?
Jeanette, a forty-year-old grandmother in Orlando.
Derick, a forklift driver in Atlanta who's only twenty-seven but is "so mature."
Apparently Jeanette's been willfully ignoring a lot of salient information about Derick, whom she's been talking to since they met on Plenty Of Fish a year ago, because she's not actually the one who contacted the show: that job has fallen to her twenty-one-year-old daughter, Shuntay. And to hear Shuntay tell it, Derick's following the Catfish playbook pretty closely: he's very shmoopy on the phone and in texts, but he's never been able to meet Jeanette in person. In a slight departure from the usual, he has agreed to videochat with Jeanette before, but when they did, the screen was black.
Derick's work schedule is so relentless that he's had to work every time Jeanette's suggested that they meet in person.
Though Jeanette's offered to adapt to his availability, he's never been able to tell her when he's going to have a day off. There's "something wrong" with the camera on his phone.
I guess because Shuntay was the one to contact the show, she gets to tag along to the coffee shop when Max and Nev commence sleuthing, but she barely knows anything more than they do, so it's not like she can really add much colour to either the material Jeanette's given them to work with, or the new information they turn up. (Theory: Max is so sick of this show that he needs a Nev buffer.)
Whatever the reason, let's get down to business! They start with Derick's Facebook page, which is apparently full enough of friends not to be suspect on its own, other than that a lot of them are female. And the personal details line up with what he's told Jeanette about himself...
...though I guess spelling isn't highly valued at the place of business where Derick works as a "General Laboror." He recently posted a photo on Facebook which Max notes is from Snapchat...
...and which Nev notes proves that the front-facing camera on his phone definitely works. Shuntay's reaction to this deduction...
...is our first glimpse at what a bad actor she is. Based on Shuntay's awkward improvisations, I'm convinced that she knew a lot more about what Max and Nev are "uncovering" for her before she got in front of the cameras.
Next, they image-search the shot, among the ones Jeanette sent, that looks the most sketchy in that it seems like it very well could have come from a modeling portfolio.
Is this fuckboi Derick?!
Looks like no. This Jeremale is on Twitter and Instagram. So we know that Jeanette never watched Catfish until Shuntay told her about it. But that means Shuntay watched, which presumably means she also knows how to do a reverse image search, and all it would take for her to get her own copies of Derick's photos would be to grab Jeanette's phone and text them to herself. There's no way she didn't at least do that before she contacted the show, right? And just brought in these two boners to back her up in expressing her concerns about Jeanette's relationship with Derick?
What else might Shuntay be pretending she didn't already know? Well, for starters, that Jeanette better HOPE she's not actually talking to the dude in the photos...
...because he's in high school.
YOUR MOM SHOULD BE SCARED ABOUT THIS, LADY. And also, thank god you were here to give us that prediction as to your mom's likely emotional reaction; we never would have guessed that on our own.
The last bombshell: the phone is registered to a Derica with Derick's last name, in Georgia. Well, we've seen this one before! A bunch! Shuntay's spoken to Derick on the phone before and claims his voice is "kind of deep"; when Max says they've had stories before of women whose voices sound like men's (and how), Shuntay has more priceless insight to offer:
Oh yeah? You hope not? You hope your mom hasn't wasted a year believing that some stranger is going to marry her and take in her and you and your son? This is priceless insight!!!
Same.
Poor Jeanette: her first thought, after fleeing the table of revelation to fret in the garage, is that she's "been talking to a baby," forcing Max to tell her it's far more likely that some totally unrelated person stole said baby's photos to deceive her and that she is not at risk of being prosecuted as a pedo. But evidently she's not trying to hear that because when she comes back in, she makes Nev turn the page of photos of Jeremale away from her and says she's "sorry" for having been talking to a teenager. Nev then has to repeat what Max just told her, which makes their having to move on to telling her she's possibly been talking to a woman even touchier than usual. That said, her muted reaction to this news makes me suspect that she knew some of this already, too? This episode is weird.
Anyway, duh, Jeanette wants to meet the person she's been talking to, so Nev goes outside to call the number Jeanette's got and go through his usual spiel. Derick volunteers, "I love her, I want to be with her." Asked what the impediment to their meeting in person has been, he offers the official non-explanation explanation: "I've just got a lot of stuff going on." Nev courteously lets Derick know they know that the photos are stolen and the Facebook page isn't real, and Derick admits that he's not actually named Derick, and that he's thirty-one, not twenty-seven. Because we wouldn't be watching this otherwise, Derick agrees to let them come meet him. Shuntay volunteers to join them, which, wait to be invited before you start spending MTV's money!
As Nev and Max pull away, Jeanette finally breaks down on Shuntay's shoulder.
Good lord. It's bad enough when dopes in their twenties say dumb shit like that. Jeanette is forty and she's making the rest of us look bad. (What's that? I turned forty-one three months ago? ARE YOU SURE THOUGH?)
Jeanette and Shuntay are going to look back on their lives someday and feel really fucking sheepish that the very first time they ever packed up all their false eyelashes and took a plane anywhere, it was for this. We already know Derick is not Derick, and that he does not have the face of Jeremale. So who comes out of this house in the middle of GD nowhere?
This is, in fact, the very Derica we all expected to meet as soon as that name came up when they searched Derick's phone number. Jeanette doesn't take it well.
Derica doesn't know what to say after introducing herself, but confirms that she is the person Jeanette's been speaking to. Jeanette -- rather more mildly than I would have expected -- asks why Derica did all this, and she mumbles that it was "something to do....I was bored and I made a profile." Shuntay, smiling uncomfortably/idiotically, opines that it's "messed up" for Derica to have played with Jeanette's feelings, but everyone's really subdued: even as they point out that Derica lied about her name, age, location, and sex, none of the accusers seems that upset and Derica's not at all defensive. Not even when she says that, as a woman who dates other woman, she made a male profile online "just to have fun" does her affect get any less flat. Jeanette, I guess, gets a message in her earpiece from a producer telling her to get madder about the year she wasted talking to Derick and tries to bring some heat, but her heart's not in it, particularly after Derica says she meant it all the times she said she loved Jeanette and wanted to be with her. "I'm so angry with you right now, like I hate you, I wanna hit you so bad," says Jeanette flatly. She's almost as bad an actor as her daughter, though. Seriously, other than Shuntay being there? This is literally nothing we haven't seen half a dozen times before. "It's tragic that it got this far," Max tells Jeanette. A year is tragic? You just handled SEVEN years LAST WEEK. I'm so bored I'M going to make a profile!
Well, the first item of note is that now all of a sudden Jeanette refers to Derica having kept this up for "nine months," so maybe let's cool it with saying "a year" over and over again. The reason is, of course, that Derica really does love Jeanette, as much as one can love someone she's never met and with whom she's communicated only in very superficial texts. Then Jeanette and Derica get into a weird sidebar where they briefly argue about whether they could, as Jeanette and Derick had discussed, ever have kids together, which seems, no pun intended, unproductive.
Max and Nev prompt Derica to offer up some details of her own biography to try to salvage the few real elements of her relationship with Jeanette were real, like: did Derica, like Derick, lose her mother at a formative age? She did -- ten days before her sixteenth birthday; Derica's grandfather then died the day after her birthday. She was on her own after that, more or less, started selling drugs, and went to prison. It also sounds like she started dating older women so she could live with them and so they'd support her, but the specifics on how much of that was transactional aren't that clear -- which is a good thing, since Nev is, historically, not super-great digging into same-sex relationships and how they work.
Also a good thing: Max, Nev, and Shuntay pretty quickly leave and let Jeanette and Derica say goodbye, pretty much -- though it's clear that if Jeanette were into it, Derica would want to try to make good on all Derick's problems...other than the baby thing. "I'm sure there's somebody out there for you, but it's not me," says Jeanette, fairly generously under the circumstances. "This will be our last time seeing each other," she adds. "I won't contact you no more. I wish you luck with your future plans. I gotta make new ones." That line feels a little bit workshopped, but I guess she's entitled. Derica understands. "I'm sorry, Jeanette," she says as Jeanette gets up to leave. "I'm sorry too, Derica," says Jeanette. I kind of thought Jeanette would be shittier about it than that, so good for her.
There are no hugs.
Two months later, Jeanette says she and Derica have spoken occasionally, but that they have a cordial-ish relationship. Derica corroborates Jeanette's version of the story, adding that she's glad to have Jeanette as a friend.
Listen to your daughter. Rather than expose your mom to embarrassment on a national scale by reporting her to Catfish, consider just showing her the skills the show taught you and settling matters privately and in your own home. No one's phone camera is "messed up."