Where do married people go when love dies on the vine?
Some couples seek counsel while others stick together for the kids, but when your entire life together has been a cable reality series, you send that marriage right back to the shop for retooling. Jon and Kate Gosselin are taking a TV timeout.
The unseemly public soap opera that is Jon & Kate Plus 8 (TLC, 9 p.m.) takes a month-long break after tonight's new episode.
TLC immediately put the show on hiatus following last Monday night's episode announcing the couple's plans to legally split. The episode pulled in more than 10.6-million U.S. viewers - the highest in the show's history. Since returning in April, Jon & Kate has nearly doubled its ratings, because some people simply enjoy watching a marriage fall apart.
Anyone who's been through a supermarket checkout can confirm the Gosselin marriage has been publicly crumbling since photos of Jon allegedly stepping out on Kate turned up last spring.
The subtext thus far seems to be that Jon is the non-communicative cad, while Kate is the spurned, sort of controlling harridan, who recently got a sassy new hairstyle. He's been linked to a 23-year-old schoolteacher, she to a hunky bodyguard. Now they move to a bigger fishbowl.
Media coverage of the Jon and Kate meltdown spiked madly last week, at least before the story was bumped by Michael Jackson's death.
Beyond the inevitable tabloid coverage and torrid headlines ("Kate's Private Hell," "It Feels Like I Failed"), the story bled into the mainstream press. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi likened the celebu-couple to Liz and Dick, as in Taylor and Burton, thereby betraying his age. Why is The Wall Street Journal covering the Jon and Kate story? Because everyone is talking about it.
The Jon and Kate saga was all over television following last Monday's separation episode. Every U.S. news outlet kept the breakup story in heavy rotation and hauled out the usual relationship experts (who knew Dr. Joyce Brothers was still around?). For a few days, it was the stuff of Letterman Top-10 lists and talk-show monologues. The ladies of The View talked about it every day.
But hold the phone, didn't these two have kids? The coda to every Jon and Kate story includes passing reference to their brood of eight children - two seven-year-olds, six five-year-olds - who are presumably the show's raison d'être. Joy Behar seems particularly concerned.
The kids are played for pathos in tonight's episode, the last new outing before the show's return on Aug. 3. To close off one chapter of their TV lives, the Gosselins have permitted their home movies to be merged with show clips for a retro-special of touching moments taken from their 10-year marriage. Have you people no shame?
Likely not. The home movies begin with Jon and Kate's nuptials, wheel through the blessed arrivals of the twins and sextuplets, and closes with last week's separately filmed segments, wherein the couple say the children will stay in the Gosselin house, a $1.3-million (U.S.) estate paid for by the show's proceeds, and Jon and Kate will take turns living there.
But first a breather, and the necessary adjustment to ad rates. Jon and Kate have a 40-episode deal with TLC and only six episodes have aired.
The channel needs the next month to revamp the show to a new split-family format, and compile TMZ-style footage of the couple's new lives, and loves. The days of playhouses and potty-training are over for Jon & Kate Plus 8 .
Further evidence of love's strangeness fuels the classless series A Shot at Love II with Tila Tequila (MuchMusic, 9 p.m.). It's a dating-game series much like the old Dating Game , except in this case the swingin' single girl goes both ways. Hubba-hubba.
If you saw the first season of Shot of Love , you know the routine. Equal groups of straight males and lesbian females share a house with the scantily clad Tila Tequila, apparently some sort of Internet model. Ms. Tila puts them through ridiculous challenges and head games that occasionally lead to make-out sessions. Sometimes girls kiss girls.
More often, though, A Shot of Love breeds conflict and the type of confrontations normally witnessed outside tacky watering holes at closing time. Sometimes it gets ugly.
Tonight, two alpha-dudes, named Chad and Bo, have at each other in pursuit of Tila's affections. Following a heated discussion, Chad delivers a vicious headbutt to Bo's noggin. Chad is booted out of the house, while Bo ends up in the hospital. Love hurts.
Also airing:
Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic (TCM, 8 p.m.) profiles the man who created the big movie blockbuster. Narrated by Kenneth Branagh, the documentary covers DeMille's early career in silent films and his founding of Paramount Pictures, one of the first major film studios. The program touches on the producer-director's famously fiery temper - his movie sets ran with military precision - and accolades pour forth from the likes of Angela Lansbury, Charlton Heston and other Hollywood notables. The highlight is the behind-the-scenes footage of DeMille's 1956 Biblical epic The Ten Commandments . Even Steven Spielberg remains impressed by the parting of the Red Sea.
Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America (PBS, 10 p.m.) is the six-part treatise on comedy that ran earlier this season. The second chapter in the series examines the domestic sitcom, an American institution predating television itself. According to this report, the concept was lifted from thirties radio programs and transferred neatly over to fifties sitcoms like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners , and still appears to pull in viewers today. Is there really any substantive difference between Ralph Kramden and Homer Simpson? A.R.
John Doyle returns on July 23.