The Dow is down 200 points this morning on this horrible news!
It was a sad night. I miss the early seasons when they all seemed happy and focused on the kids. The kids didn’t “play interview”. Kate’s constant sniping at Jon was a LOT less frequent and seemed more playful banter. Jon’s immaturity seemed more like the normal cluelessness of trying to figure out how to be a parent.
kittenblue Kate was a nurse before she had the sextuplets and Jon was an IT guy, if I remember right. In the very beginning Kate worked like once or twice a month, but she just couldn’t keep it up with 8 tiny kids. Jon worked the first few seasons of the show, but eventually they made so much off the show and were doing so many more activities, that he quit to do the show full time.
To me, the saddest part of the show I’ve seen was the very end of the last season. They are sitting there being interviewed together, talking about the next season. Jon talks about how he’s tired of doing it all and Kate talks about how much she loves it. And they don’t know what is going to happen. You can just see that huge conflict, and even then you know that Kate will get what she wants and Jon will continue to be miserable.
My wife and I watched a couple episodes a year or two ago, and Kate seemed like a shrill harpy at the best of times. At the time, I think Jon still had his IT job. When did they move to the place in last night’s show? It looks like quite a spread; must be a few acres. I didn’t see the house, though. Was all that made possible by the show?
I gave it up the day she took videos of the kids’ first poo in the potty chair.
That said, I heard they will live in the house with the kids on some kind of schedule rather than trying to haul the pack across town. The show will continue at least through this season. I think they’ll do what they have to do to keep the show going. I don’t know what earning potential they each have, but the show is definitely a huge source of income to them.
You know if this wasn’t an anonymous message board I would never admit this but ashamedly I have seen pretty much every episode since this show began.
While Jon has remained pretty much the same guy over the years Kate has dramtically changed into the monster you see today. They both started out young and didn’t have a lot of money. He worked IT and she was a nurse. Through infertility treatments they had the twin girls. They wanted to have one more kid and did infertility treatments again and ended up with 6 more.
With the huge financial burden looming overhead they grasped onto the idea of turning their one-time-documentary special into a series and it became their financial savior.
With the stress and burden of raising 8 kids and no blueprint on how to do it Kate pretty much took the reigns and decided it was going to be done her way. While she says Jon was her partner in this he became more of an employee of hers. He was just there to take directions and be at her beck and call. If he didn’t stay in line and keep up with her she never hesitated to reprimand and demean him.
You could watch this wear on him over the years. He never fought back and just went with the flow.
Later on when the show got really popular and Kate got in her eyes they started doing books and appearances. Kate loved it. She saw it as a business, her business, and she was going to get all she could from it. While Jon enjoyed the financial perks (he quit his job and didn’t have to work) he hated the business, decided he would stay at home while she traveled doing appearances and book signings. As she started embracing the fame and turning herself into a Victoria Beckham wannabe Jon started to resent her.
He was eager to slow things down and get back to reality. But Kate would have no part of it and in her own words “The Show Must Go On!”
He withdrew and started hanging out with old friends trying to figure out what his place in this whole mess was.
I guess Kate expected to go on with her dream job/life and expected Jon to do, well, whatever. She didn’t care. He stopped being a partner a long time ago and was just another employee to her. If he wasn’t going to follow her lead he could go do whatever he wanted.
And so it lead to this. Jon deciding he would be better off doing something, anything else besides being her whipping boy.
I read in the paper today that she actually said, “The show must go on.”
There is no reason (other than financial) why it “must go on!” You and your husband have been living your lives on television for money and forcing your children to do likewise. Now that something deeply traumatic has happened, shouldn’t you be considering your children’s emotional health and future? Isn’t it time to shut down the cameras?
Edit: Scooped by Hampshire on the quote.
They said the kids will continue to live full time in the house. Whichever parent has custody/filming rights that day/week/whatever will live in the house with them. It also sounded like they’ll be filming the rest of the season (40 episodes total I believe) separately. Considering how far they’ve moved from “here’s a typical day in our family” to “who’s the stunt celebrity/what’s the staged activity” as the theme of the show, this should be easy to do.
And fuck them both BTW. They should have quit the show before getting to the point where they had to divorce. Fuck Jon for being a spineless coward, and fuck Kate for being a shrill controlling bitch. Their kids (any kids) deserve better than either of them.
They make $75,000 per episode. They moved into their new house last year which cost $1.1 million. They get tons of freebies through promoting other peoples stuff. They got all of those “crooked houses” for free in exchange for the guys company being on the show.
If you pop over to the crooked house website, they’ve already got pictures of the Gosselins’ houses up in their gallery. No mention of the Gosselins by name though.
The obvious answer to the child custody question is for custody to be awarded to the television program. That way the show can continue indefinitely, perhaps on a house in a soundstage. If Jon & Kate are difficult, actors can be brought in to portray the parents.
My teen daughter loves watching the kids – she has all their quirks memorized, but I just cringe at Kate’s constant shredding of Jon’s masculinity. I don’t want her to think that that is the way to be a parent. I just want to slap Kate and tell her to shut up and quit thinking that she is the queen of the world.
He was fired from his IT job for misuse of company resources. Too many calls home?
I’m looking forward to more episodes of Jon or Kate Plus 8. She’s right, it will be more peaceful without them together.
But she has a lot of nerve saying it’s because they are parents of multiples. They’re hardly the typical parents of multiples. And look at Table for Ten – just a cool regular family (even with the cameras) where the parents are a good team.
I’ll get whacked for this but . . . why is it bad for them to be on TV? The kids seem fine. They, J&K have the ability to earn a good living for themselves and the kids, while they both get to stay home and take care of them. Tell me another job that they could have that would enable them both not to “work” but make a million, or millions per year?
You know what? In their particular case, I don’t think it is “bad”, provided that they’ve got an exit strategy. It’s fine while the kids are little, but since it’s not something the kids had any choice about, IMO you’ve got to be prepared to stop when (or preferably before) it becomes a privacy issue for them. Broadcasting your experiences caring for eight small children isn’t the same as broadcasting the experiences of a bunch of teenagers, without them having any real say about it.
Jon wanted out of the show. He was tired of having camera crews in his house all the time, he was tired of being recognized whenever he went out, he was tired of dealing with being a minor celebrity, he was tired of his job being the guy who takes shit from Kate to make interesting TV. Kate wanted to continue the show, and had no interest whatsoever in his opinion. So it’s not bad that they were on TV, it’s bad that one of them decided that the TV show was more important than their marriage.
Oh, I entirely agree with that, I’m just saying that it totally made sense from a financial perspective for them to do the show, but it should always have been with a plan to bow out gracefully when necessary.
Sorry, I was replying to spifflog, not you. I agree with your assessment too. They should have banked their money and gotten out after season 3, before the show turned into into Kate Incorporated.
I think the older kids are getting pretty close to the point of when the kids may start having serious trouble with privacy fears and other issues, though. I looked it up; the twins are 9. At some point (if they haven’t already), they might start feeling like they never have any privacy, like the cameras might come back at any moment or might be hiding/filming secretly.
I’ve read commentary on the series from former child actors who worry about things like child labor laws and suggest they may be “on set” for longer than they’re supposed to, but that since it’s a reality show it’s easier for the rules to be dodged. They also talked about the screwed-up sort of reality they had with cameras around, with fame, etc. The kids don’t have a say in this, and I worry that when it gets to the point where one of the kids has a serious problem with their situation, it’ll be the middle of the season or whatever and their parents will go with contractual obligations/promise of that paycheck over anything else.
Didn’t a Doper claim he or she saw Jon hitting on some young women in a bar a few months back?
Yeah, but it’s certainly seductive to keep making $75K an episode, freebies, and for an attention whore like her, to be a public speaker. I could see myself getting used to it and wanting the money to keep coming in, especially if I could keep telling myself it’s for the kids. They have claimed they would pull the plug if any of the kids ever objects but who knows.