Season 13 of Au pairit Marokossa took us to Marrakesh to follow Sabina, Helin, Kiara, and Rebecca, four au pairs living with local families, adjusting to a culture where neighbors and relatives come and go through open doors. Different ways of life collide, language gets in the way more often than not, and the four of them lean on each other while their feelings about Morocco shift from friction to something closer to home.

The hardest part of the job was casting the families. A host household has to work on camera as much as it works in real life: open enough to let a crew in for weeks, but different enough from the au pair moving in that there’s actual friction and actual warmth to film. We spent weeks meeting families across Marrakesh, sitting with them to understand daily routines, language spoken at home, how many generations lived under one roof, before matching each one to an au pair whose story would play well against theirs. Once families were locked in, we handled the rest: permits, local crew, and keeping the shoot moving through people’s actual homes without disrupting their actual lives.