Divorce at The Learning Channel? Well, for starters, it's against the brand.
Built on family-friendly fare, the network produces shows that speak to the American heartland, that place – both mythic and real – where people bake cakes, live behind white picket fences and produce adorable munchkins. Which may explain the odd way that the news of Jon and Kate Gosselin's separation and impending divorce was told on the much-anticipated episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8 that aired Monday night on TLC.
How else to explain that whole bit with Crooked Houses, the playhouses installed for their children that are custom-designed to be whimsically off-kilter?
Perhaps the show's producers were trying their hand at hopeful metaphor, suggesting that Gosselin family life will continue, just differently: Fingers crossed, they will have a crooked, but still functional, family.
Uncomfortable as the issue may be for the cable channel – the show has been put on hiatus until Aug. 3 “to determine the best way to continue to tell their story” – it is also a great opportunity.
The Gosselins have never held themselves up as perfectly functioning partners. The way they discussed spats during interviews – often sprinkled with terse utterances of “honey” and “babycakes” – was sometimes as cute as their eight children. Who hasn't suppressed frustration with his spouse by agreeing to her wishes through clenched jaws?
Family life is a never-ending and intricate drama, filled with moments of hilarity, sadness, frustration, joy and hope. It is in their domestic lives that many people experience their greatest happiness, and their most painful disappointments.
The home is the world writ small. And the appeal of Jon & Kate Plus 8 was always that it was an exponential version of Mr. and Mrs. Average and their family of 2.5 children. Viewers could identify with their struggles and challenges. It didn't matter that they have eight-year-old twins and five-year-old sextuplets. It doesn't take eight children in a van for a mother to forget someone's flip-flops as she is backing out of the driveway. It can happen with one child. (Heck, it can happen without any.) The show is a powerful documentation of everyday parenting, only in extremis .
Jon and Kate Gosselin are – well, were – a sweet, normal couple, whose courtship and wedding videos underscored the “reality” of their love before the children, and the show, came into being. And the story of how they rose to the challenge of being parents mirrors many couples' experience of having children.
One of the great unknowns in any marriage is how competent and caring the spouse you picked will be as a parent. Even if your boyfriend knows how to hold a baby or likes to play with toddlers – actions that speak subliminal volumes to many women's marriage decisions (come on, admit it) – he could turn out to be a dad dud. So when Mr. Gosselin, who was only 22 when they married and acknowledged that he “wasn't thinking kids right away,” turned out to be a good dad, he resonated with many parents.
“He had to settle down real quick,” Ms. Gosselin has said of her husband. She, on the other hand, was ready to have the twins. “He was unsure,” she explained. Still, he “stepped right in,” she said sweetly, turning to him in one of their early interviews. He was “superdad instantly.”
When she found out she was pregnant with sextuplets, she had no doubt she could count on her husband, she said.
