SCREEN & CULTURE

I Don’t Like to Watch: TLC’s “Jon and Kate Plus 8″

By G. Arnold

[originally published May 27, 2009]

In the 1984 movie “Irreconcilable Differences,” a young girl (played by Drew Barrymore) sues her selfish and completely self-absorbed parents for divorce. Though a pleasant enough film for its era, it’s hardly a movie that springs to mind very often. Yet, as we’ve been inundated with news surrounding the depressing spectacle that is TLC’s series “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” I’ve been thinking about that old film.

“Jon & Kate Plus 8” purports to follow the struggles of Kate and Jon Gosselin as they raise their energetic children. The series has developed a big following over the past several years. Until this season, viewers were treated mostly to scenes featuring lots of cute kids and often showing parents struggling to manage a busy life of child-rearing. It all seemed quite quaint, even if somewhat staged.

The new season, however, finds the focus shifting away from the still-adorable children and more in the direction of their parents. Sadly, the Gosselin marriage appears to be on the rocks. A string of sensational charges has made the rounds throughout the media. This is not a happy development for anybody, except, perhaps, for the accounting department at TLC.

Indeed, the Gosselins’ relationship troubles are adding up to big numbers for the network. Over 9 million viewers tuned in Sunday night for the season premiere. This should not surprise us. As television executives have long known, American television viewers love a sordid family spectacle, especially if it has a moralistic subtext. It was not so long ago, after all, that the airwaves were abuzz with stories about Nadya Suleman, a woman who became known as “Octo-Mom.”

The new wrinkle to “Jon & Kate Plus 8” may be good business, but it is a much more dubious commentary on the state of our culture. Jon and Kate Gosselin are adults, of course, and regardless of whatever else we may think about their situation, they chose to make their lives available for public consumption in return for money and notoriety.

But the justification for filming the daily lives of the children has never been as clear. And with their parents’ onscreen meltdown taking center stage, it’s hard to see how further intrusion into the lives of these children is warranted. Wouldn’t it be better to give the children privacy? Shouldn’t we let them come to terms with the changing state of their family life away from the spotlight? It seems the decent thing to do.

So far, the adult Gosselins don’t seem ready to pull the plug on their series or to abandon the lifestyle that the series made possible. And TLC, which is one of the Discovery network’s properties, is not a public charity. It operates to make a profit. It’s hard to imagine that the company will just walk away from a show that has attracted so much attention.

In “Irreconcilable Differences,” the child at the center of the story resorts to hiring an attorney to look out for her interests. As for the Gosselin children, it remains to be seen what will become of them, or who will advocate for their interests and privacy.

In the meantime, I, for one, do not care to watch the implosion of a family or to encourage television executives to use family crises for entertainment purposes.

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G. Arnold is an editor of Bread and Circus.