TLC is Famously Exploitative, But Its Investment in the Duggar Family is a Whole Other Level
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Amazon Prime
Say it’s 2008. You’re the patriarch of ultra-conservative Christian family whose political and religious views are super fringe. You belong to a white supremacist, fundamentalist Christian organization—the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP)—and believe women and children should defer to their husbands and fathers, that they should dress modestly to avoid setting ‘eye traps’ for men, that children should be spanked for hours on end to teach them discipline and that couples shouldn’t use birth control. Horrifyingly, you think young women (and in IBLP circles, it is mostly young women) who are sexually or physically abused are to blame for their abuse. In fact, IBLP teachings say experiencing this abuse at the hands of their relatives and/or religious leaders actually brings them closer to God. Disney, TV, secular music, even the news are all forbidden in your home. Also: your eldest child has already admitted to molesting his sisters and a babysitter, though you’ve managed to cover that up with the help of an Arkansas state trooper (… who would later be convicted on child pornography charges and sentenced to 56 years in prison). Why in the world would you sign on to star in a reality TV show? And how could any television network ethically let you?
It takes less than two minutes for Shiny Happy People, the new Amazon Prime docuseries about the Duggar family, to answer the first question. It was an opportunity to evangelize to a vast audience, duh. At the 1:05 mark of episode one, Duggar cousin Amy King is heard saying, “I asked him, my uncle, ‘You don’t believe in TV. Why are you on television?’ And he responded with, ‘Well, this is a ministry.’” The uncle, Duggar patriarch Jim Bob, was not wrong; the show, which ran on TLC from 2008 to 2015, regularly drew massive audiences. Its ninth season premiere attracted 3.29 million viewers, which is about the same number of people who watched Dancing With the Stars, Brooklyn 99, The Simpsons or American Idol that season. Later, an episode focused on daughter Jill’s wedding would draw 4.4 million viewers, becoming TLC’s most-watched telecast in four years. And as Shiny Happy People shows, those millions of viewers weren’t just gawking at the television equivalent of a freak show—they were absorbing the Duggars’ values. Just before King shares her uncle’s reasoning for doing a reality TV show, the docuseries shows footage of fans excitedly lining up to interact with the family at what looks like a series of mall meet-and-greets. In line, one young white man in a navy EMT t-shirt says he wants to name his child after Jim Bob, because “Jim Bob is the man.” Then, an even younger white woman can be seen telling two Duggar children that she has decided to ‘save’ her first kiss until marriage.
What’s not clear to me, even after watching all four episodes of Shiny Happy People, is the answer to my second question—and that is the central failing of TLC, and a major misstep in the docuseries.
Who are the Duggars and how did they even become reality TV stars?
A quick recap: Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are religious extremists from Arkansas who have 19 biological children, all of whom have names starting with J. The family first came to the public’s attention because of Jim Bob’s political career; after serving in the Arkansas House of Representatives for four years, he unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 2002, which led to a New York Times profile complete with a photo of him, Michelle and nine of their (at the time) 13 children in matching red outfits, polos for the boys and old-fashioned pinafores for the girls. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez, religious historian and professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University, explains in the docuseries, Jim Bob may have lost his Senate run, but he gained something even better: a whole new career. Parents magazine went on to run a profile of the family, which in turn drew the attention of Discovery Health. From there, the network produced several one-hour documentaries about the Duggars before offering them an actual show on sister channel TLC in 2008.
This all happened during a period of evolution for TLC. What started as a NASA-funded educational channel in the 1970s had, by 1991, been acquired by Discovery and was starting to pivot away from educational programming about science, history and literacy toward reality TV instead. This began with shows like Trauma: Life in the ER, but soon encompassed more lifestyle-y content, including A Wedding Story and Trading Spaces. By the early 2000s, this strategy had evolved further into what sociologist Danielle Lindemann describes in the docuseries as a focus on “train wrecks” and “contemporary freak shows.” Little People Big World, about a couple with dwarfism and their children, premiered in 2006. Jon and Kate Plus 8 premiered the following year. The network would go on to air shows like Toddlers and Tiaras, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Hoarding: Buried Alive and My Strange Addiction, all of which exploited people in one way or another for viewers’ entertainment.
And 19 Kids and Counting fit right in on the exploitation front. I mean, the labour issues alone! According to a 2021 Los Angeles Times article, “there were longstanding questions about the way 19 Kids and Counting and other unscripted programs featuring underage stars were able to skirt child labor [sic] laws because they were classified as documentaries. A 2010 investigation by The Times revealed that producers of 19 Kids and Counting and other reality TV programs had not obtained work permits to employ minors under 16. Patriarch Jim Bob Duggar said at the time the family didn't consider the filming to be work.” Of course, filming is work—and according to Jill Duggar Dillard, the fourth of the Duggar children, she and her siblings were never fairly compensated for their contributions. In Shiny Happy People, she explained that her mother signed contracts with TLC on her behalf well after she was legally an adult, and when her parents did consider her old enough to sign her own contracts, she was tricked into doing so without reading what she was agreeing to. That’s how she and her husband ended up filming when she was delivering her first child, even though she didn’t want to, and later cutting a mission trip to El Salvador short because they had to return to the States to shoot scenes for the show. Of course, when Jill and her husband later pressed Jim Bob on why the younger Duggars hadn’t been paid, he did offer to compensate them… to the tune of $10 an hour. For reference, the L.A. Times reports that the Duggars “made $25,000 to $40,000 an episode, with millions more in income from speaking fees, book sales, DVDs and brand sponsorships. [The show also] helped boost profits for TLC, bringing the network an estimated $25 million in ad revenue in 2015, according to research firm iSpot.tv.”
TLC helped sanitize a truly frightening movement—and the network didn’t stop until it was literally forced to
But as bad as it was for TLC and the Duggar parents to financially exploiting the children, not to mention deny them privacy and agency, something much worse was also going on: the network was actively sanitizing the family’s extreme religious and political beliefs, and empowering them to use their burgeoning fame as a recruiting tool.
Briefly, IBLP is fucked. Founded by Bill Gothard in 1961, in some ways, it’s your typical authoritarian, ultra-conservative religious cult run by abusers. Women and girls are expected to submit, first to their fathers, then their husbands. Children are homeschooled as a means to control their thinking and suppress free thought, and while no one is really learning math or history, girls in particular are mostly educated on becoming good wives and mothers, which includes not tempting men with their mere existence. (The eye traps, remember?) Drugs and alcohol are verboten, obviously, but so are TV, movies, any music with a strong beat, most books, dancing, even Cabbage Patch dolls. At the same time, Gothard has been accused of sexual harassment by more than 30 women, “all with similar allegations, “ according to People. They all accused “Gothard of targeting teen girls and young women to be on his staff, making unwanted and inappropriate physical contact and failing to report child abuse cases.” In fact, the documentary argues that IBLP creates a climate of abuse that starts at the top and is then replicated in many of its households, which is why it’s no surprise that Josh Duggar molested his sisters, was unfaithful to his wife and was eventually tried and convicted for possession of child pornography—or that his parents initially tried to sweep his misdeeds under the rug, lied about his behaviour and are still standing by him.
But, a thing I did not know: IBLP’s goal was literal world domination. The ministry is perhaps most famous for its homeschooling resources and ‘seminars,’ but it also offered a boot camp for teen boys, ALERT, which some former members characterize as paramilitary training. Why does a church need thousands of young men who have received paramilitary training, you ask? Three guesses. IBLP’s teachings also reportedly influenced the Joshua Generation, which attorney Alex Harris, a former member of the group, describes as, “one of the most ambitious plots of modern evangelical history, and almost no one has ever heard of it.” Named after an Old Testament story, Harris goes on to explain that this movement is “a decades-long, multi-generational plan to raise an elite strikeforce of Christian homeschool graduates to infiltrate the highest levels of government. The whole purpose was really to position kind of the best and brightest of the Christian homeschool movement to assume positions of power and influence in government and in the law. The goal was Christian homeschool graduates who would be U.S. senators, who would be U.S. presidents, and most importantly, who would be U.S. Supreme Court justices, in order to bring America back to its rightful position as a truly Christian nation.” (This is not to be confused with other uses of this metaphor, including in reference to former U.S. president Barack Obama.) (Also, Harris goes into much more detail in this Twitter thread, which really gets into the history and nuances of this movement… and why it’s arguably working.)
19 Kids and Counting obviously doesn’t talk about any of this. In fact, it glosses over every troubling part of the Duggars’ religious and political views. Rules intended to keep women and children isolated and easily controlled were instead “presented as harmless, quaint quirks,” as Vanity Fair’s Eve Batey put it this week. The show often focused on how the Duggars cared for their super-sized family (a buddy system, multiple freezers, a family bus), and when it mentioned their evangelical faith, it was rarely if ever by name and always in positive but vague terms—though their website had far more information for anyone who was intrigued by what they saw on the show. The children were well-behaved, but there was no acknowledgement of the role parentifaction and emotional and physical abuse played in teaching them to be so ‘good.’ And Jim Bob was portrayed as a kindly lug instead of a power broker who exerted control over every aspect of his family’s lives.
It’s not possible that TLC didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes
Executive producer Blye Pagon Faust told Vanity Fair, Shiny Happy People “is not a takedown of TLC,” though it seems that’s not for lack of trying. “We did a very strong outreach to numerous people who work on the different seasons of the shows, and we just didn’t have anybody who was willing to speak on the record,” Faust says, implying that it just wasn’t possible for the docuseries’ producers to know who at TLC knew the truth about the Duggars and IBLP, or when they knew it.
But there’s no way TLC knew nothing about the Duggars’ problematic religion. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar worked hard to hide Josh molesting five minors, so while there was a police report, elders from the church knew and, according to family friend Bobye Holt, it was an open secret within the community, I guess I can see how producers might miss that, especially if they didn’t have relationships within IBLP themselves. But producers never addressed the family’s off-camera activism, including Michelle narrating a robocall asking residents in Fayetteville, Arkansas to protest an anti-discrimination ordinance that would strengthen protections for LGTBQ+ people in the city. When Bill Gothard was pushed out of IBLP because of his sexual harassment allegations in 2014, there didn’t seem to be any worry over whether it was ethical to continue promoting his religion via the Duggars’ show. The network decided to keep working with the family after news about the molestations broke in 2015; it cancelled 19 Kids and Counting, but quickly began producing a spin-off series, Counting On, which focused on all the siblings except Josh—but including his wife and children—because the Duggar cash cow was too valuable to lose. And when Josh was arrested for possession of child pornography in April 2021, it took two months and serious public pressure before the network completely cut ties with the family.
To be clear, TLC stays platforming abusers because audiences keep watching and advertisers keep paying, so this isn’t a surprise, but it is an ethical failure. I think it’s important to acknowledge the role the network has played in mainstreaming this oppressive belief system—and that’s one area where the docuseries treads too lightly (though not the only one). Because while it clearly spells out how deeply horrific IBLP is and convincingly argues that the Duggar’s popularity drew new adherents to the sect and ushered in the era of the ultra-conservative Christian influencer, Shiny Happy People didn’t spend nearly enough time unpacking how the family was allowed to become so popular in the first place. And to me, that’s the scariest part of this story.
Tonight: Friday Things Live!
Friday Things is hosting a sold-out live event about how Canadian journalists are really building careers in media (*especially* when they come from historically underrepresented groups) what it's like to start your own media brand and some real talk on what it'll take to create a thriving media ecosystem for ourselves—and for future generations of journalists.
Tonight’s convo will feature super-smart panellists:
✨ Nicola Hamilton, graphic designer and founder of Issues Magazine Shop
✨ Tayo Bero, award-winning culture writer, radio producer and founder of Sisi magazine
✨ Olivia Bowden, Toronto-based reporter covering health, race and social justice
Thank you to event sponsors Cookin, Dineen Coffee Co. and Inkbox, as well as the West End Phoenix for hosting us!
And Did You Hear About…
This beautiful tribute to the Danish butter cookie tin, and its importance for so many immigrants. I mean, this line: “Desire overpowers logic, rewriting memory and rewiring the brain.”
NPR’s thoughtful analysis of The Idol, and why one reason it feels unsatisfying could be because it’s stuck in the past.
Writer Carmen Maria Machado on the two ways pop culture portrays cannibalism. (In Bon Appétit! As part of a series on changing culture around meat consumption! It’s super smart but… that’s weird, right?)
This Twitter thread of the funniest TikToks ever (for those of you who aren’t already spending too many hours on that app 😬). Also this one on truly gorgeous Chinese movie posters for non-Chinese films.
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