Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Jon&Kate Plus Eight



If I understand things correctly, this is a reality show about a couple with eight children: a set of twins and another of sextuplets. And of course this is reality, but not anything 'average': most people don't have twins AND sextuplets, and this must be the reason why the couple was selected to star in a series. Being lookers must have been another requirement, I think.

Now Jon and Kate are getting divorced:

"Kate and I have decided to separate," Jon said, sitting alone on the couch.

"I was too passive," Jon said of their relationship. "I just . . . went along with everything. Now I finally stood up on my own two feet and I'm proud of myself."

Kate offered her own outlook: "It's very uncomfortable at this point because Jon has a lot of anger towards me and I would love to discuss it with him but he won't talk to me," she said. Before the recent strife, they were just a couple trying to manage a set of twins and rambunctious sextuplets. The combination of his cool and calm demeanor and her sometimes controlling and overly organized personality were first seen on the one-hour special "Surviving Sextuplets and Twins" on Discovery Health in 2006.

So he's calm and cool and she's controlling and overly organized. Ok, I guess. I haven't seen the show.

But this isn't the only show about a very large family. The Duggars have one, too. What the popularity of such shows means is hard to tell. Is it the unusually large families that people want to watch? Or are these shows intended to promote such family sizes? If so, are the viewers aware of the fact that it is the shows which give the families they portray enough money to live on?