I realize that we’ve all pretty much moved on to gossiping about Jon and Kate Gosselin or making fun of how Kate emasculates Jon while Jon went from husband to douchebag in, like, a millisecond once that separation was announced, but I still find the story of Jon & Kate Plus 8 incredibly sad. I think that’s because the story hits so many of the traditional American story archetypes. It’s about a husband and wife who got absolutely everything they ever wanted and then realized that it was nothing like what they were expecting. It’s about two people who couldn’t find happiness through buying it. It’s about the strain put on a family when you try to serve both God and mammon. Imagine what Orson Welles could have done with this! Or F. Scott Fitzgerald! You get the point.
Mostly, though, now that the series is back after its long, self-imposed hiatus (a hiatus taken to deal with the fallout from the Gosselins’ separation, just in case you never stand in supermarket checkout aisles), it’s a show about two people trying to deal with the grief caused by their marriage dissolving through product placement. Though the show deals with the elephant in the room right at the top of tonight’s first episode and there are sporadic mentions of it throughout, the series mostly chooses to let this all play out as an undercurrent that’s barely commented on here. When one of the sextuplets (and, honestly, I can’t tell them apart, and I’ve always thought the twins were way more interesting anyway) tells her mom that dad knows everything about building a tent, Kate says, “Yeah, well, he’s not here,” and the barely controlled bitterness in her voice is about as close as the show gets to stepping up to the abyss of whatever consumed the Gosselins and replaced them with the TV stars they’ve become.
Also, the show has evolved into a show about how two people who were once normal people deal with the trappings of fame, most notably, the paparazzi. I suspect there’s a lot more the show could do in this regard, but then it might have to implicate itself in the dissolution of the marriage, and that would simply be unacceptable to TLC and/or the producers. So, instead, we get these occasional vignettes in the middle of the “This big family is just like my family only much, much larger” shenanigans to reflect on how much it sucks to have your vacation to the beach interrupted by photographers who set up shop and take pictures of you. Jon & Kate initially rose to popularity on the image of Kate as some sort of super mom who had the parenting answers for every conundrum, but her practical advice to dealing with photographers (just ignore them and live your life!) is all well and good until you consider how utterly removed it is from what the show purported to be in the first place.
The two episodes focus on some fairly typical family-type adventures. The first deals with renovating the Gosselins’ kitchen and Kate’s trip with the kids to the beach (where photographs of her in a red bikini turned up on the cover of every single tabloid, seemingly). The second involves Kate trying to give the kids what they want by offering them a camping trip in the backyard. The series wants to have it both ways. It owes the huge ratings success it’s had this summer (including several broadcasts that are among the highest-rated non-sports cable broadcasts of all time) to the tabloid buzz surrounding the central marriage, but the series built its initial success on simple, homespun tales of a large family doing normal things. So while the episodes pursue the latter, they tend to get caught up in the moments when the absence of Jon in the presence of Kate and the kids’ lives is particularly egregious, the camera hovering on these moments for just a second too long, as if to say, “Did you see it? Did you?”