TLC’s Kate Plus 8 aired its last episode Monday, bringing to a close one of the strangest, most meteoric chapters in reality television.
For those of you who were too busy raising your own families to pay much mind to this weird little pop saga, a brief recap is in order:
In 2007, TLC began documenting the everyday lives of Jon and Kate Gosselin and their eight adorably precocious children. TLC called its show Jon & Kate Plus 8, And to the surprise of many, the unassuming show charmed viewers’ socks off. Maybe some of the show’s attraction was, at first, how “real” this reality show seemed: Sure, they might’ve had a few more kids than most, but most of us could identify on some level with high-strung Kate, laid-back Jon or both. They felt a little like wacky next-door neighbors or the couple you see at a barbecue every now and then. In the beginning, they felt kinda like the real deal.
And then the show exploded. Ratings boomed. Their pictures were splashed across supermarket mags. Suddenly, Jon and Kate weren’t parents who just happened to be on a reality show. They were reality show stars who just happened to be parents. And, as perhaps we should’ve known would happen all along, their marriage imploded on screen for all of us to see. Jon left the show, while Kate Plus 8 soldiered on for two more seasons—a bizarre, mottled shell of its former self, like a one-time beauty who’s suffered from too many botox injections. TLC cancelled the show earlier this year, a victim of falling ratings.
“Ours has always been the realest reality show that’s out there,” Kate said on NBC’s The Today Show on Monday. But is that really true? By the end, Kate’s entire identity was wrapped around not reality, but a reality show—a far different thing, really. She now considers reality television a legitimate career—so much so that she’s actively searching for ways to push her dimming media star forward. She told Matt Lauer on Today, “This land of TV media all makes sense to me now” (which would make her the first, I suppose, to understand it), and telling the world, “You’ll see my kids grow up.”
It’s easy to point a mocking finger at Kate, I suppose, for her obsession with keeping her brand going. But we’re all susceptible to the sort of temptations she’s experienced the last several years. Fame is a kind of drug, I think—inherently addictive. All of us, I think, are potentially susceptible. We all long to be popular, to be noticed, to be rich.
But maybe it’s possible to kick the habit. Jon Gosselin has been detoxing for a couple of years now. And after suffering through his own post-TLC celebrity shame, he’s now working as a computer support engineer. “Reality TV is not a career,” he advised his wife—albeit through the website RumorFix. “Get back to a normal life — a simple life.”
For now, Kate’s having none of that. “It’s a situation where Jon may be accepting of mediocre for his kids and working a regular job,” she said on Today. “I want the best for my kids and the best opportunities in life… and this has provided that.”
We all want what’s best for our kids, of course. But I think that often that means giving them a normal life—the sort of life that Jon & Kate Plus 8 was a little more about way back in 2007.
Recent Comments