The End of the Eight
Today was the series finale of Jon & Kate Plus Eight. Although I’ve never really been a fan of the show, I do find the kids to be utterly adorable, and I can’t help but chuckle at their wide-eyed enthusiasm to the world at large.
Since I’ve written about the kids previously in my blog post Jon & Kate Plus an Extended Custody Battle, I felt almost obligated to see the show out. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not really a fan. This was something that Chippy Sunshine got me into, but still…there are some things that need mentioning.
Now, I’m not going to go all Hunter Thompson again, but I will revisit some of the statements I had made when the divorce between the two was announced.
“I think that today we’ve seen the end of Jon and Kate Plus 8.” - The divorce was indeed the beginning of the end for the show. After TLC announced that because of the separation and the reduction in Jon Gosselin’s role in the show, it would be rebranded as simply Kate Plus 8. Jon’s lawyers then issued a cease and desist order against TLC to stop filming at the family’s home. To make matters even murkier, TLC is suing Jon Gosselin for breach of contract for making paid and unpaid television appearances without approval.
The American legal system is a huge beast of a monster, and lawsuits could be easily dragged out over years. This new show: Kate Plus 8 wouldn’t even be able to start until the legal wranglings are complete, and if enough time has passed, it might become less attractive for TLC to consider starting up filming again.
“Ho ho, we’ll all laugh when Kate’s double-chins begin to quiver as her children rush to hug Jon and Candi (with an I) when the two come to pick them up.” - Maybe this was a harsh statement to make, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Police were summoned to the Gosselin household back in August when an argument got too loud. Apparently the yelling was caused by Jon wanting to get his then girlfriend to babysit the kids.
What I’ve seen in the last few months since the divorce announcement has been nothing less than a complete role reversal between Jon and Kate. Kate has become more lenient and less screechy. I still wouldn’t want to get anywhere within range of her well-used baby machine, but still, there’s some definite improvement there.
Jon on the other hand has become a parody of himself. In becoming ‘free’ (of the show, of Kate, of the kids, he didn’t specify) he has become ‘that guy’.
You know ‘that guy’. It’s the depressing old guy who sits off in the corner of the bar on a weeknight, drinking himself stupid while under the delusion that he’s somehow an important, successful or desirable man. The kind who gets women, a lot of them, not because he’s attractive or engaging, but because he has some money (and in Jon’s case, fame). Sure, he was living life between the thighs of a buxom young vixen, but his reality has become starkly apparent.
His recent move to delay divorce proceedings by nine months show that he’s now afraid of what he’s become and show a desire to return to a life, the only one he knows and like a doomed man, he seems to know that he wouldn’t be happy returning to his old life. It’s all he knows.
His behavior: shutting down the show, chatting up young women, delaying the divorce and so on are absolutely bizarre. It’s like Jon has become a modern day Blanche DuBois, struggling to come to terms with modern life, while living in a fantasy world of his own creation.
While I wrote earlier that Kate has become more tolerant and tolerable, by no means do I believe that continuing the show is a good thing.
“It’s [the show] been taken from us; from me and the kids.”
A television show like Jon and Kate Plus 8 is a wonderful way to allow a family opportunities that it might otherwise not have available to it. Certainly the children have had access to wonderful trips and experiences. Heck, ten years down the line, they can watch old family videos just like anybody else (only theirs has commentary, editing and a soundtrack).
The problem is that the kids (with the exception of the older twins) have never known a life where they weren’t being filmed. They’ve always been under the oppressive, all-seeing eye of a camera. For better or worse, that is their life. That kind of attention and fame can cause some real havoc on a child. I do think that the kids are going to have a hard time adjusting to not being filmed (at least by anybody who isn’t paparazzi), and I do think that the need for attention may draw the children into doing disruptive acts.
Does that mean that the twins are going to become strippers, or that drugs and alcohol will pervade the home in a decade? I don’t know. Only time can really tell.
For better or for worse, Jon and Kate Plus Eight is over. Now we can watch more important shows, like one about a bunch of bakers in New Jersey who specialize in cakes.
Tags: alcohol, cake, cake boss, drugs, finale, gosselin, Jon and Kate, lawsuits, strippers, TLC