Worst Reality Show of All Time?

What’s the one where the couple had sextuplets, and they probably violated the intent, if not the letter, of every child labor law in their state, and destroyed their marriage, while exhibiting their children in ways that made what was done to the Dionne Quintuplets look amateurish?

I never actually watched it, and yet, I seemed to be made aware of every detail of it on show promos, which were unavoidable, screaming supermarket tabloid headlines, and even on the actual, real news.

I don’t remember exactly how long ago it was, but I think it was within my son’s lifetime, so I guess the kids aren’t quite old enough for the tell-all books yet.

I’m thinking this one is pretty high on the list just for the child exploitation. The others mentioned may have more raw awfulness in terms of broken limbs, but at least those were entered into voluntarily by consenting adults.

Jon and Kate Plus 8? I don’t think I ever saw an episode but I’ve seen plenty of clips. She has done her best to portray him as a monster but I always felt bad for him. She always seemed to be chasing fame and he looked miserable on camera and couldn’t wait to be away from it. It was clear who was 100% behind getting the family on TV. I felt bad for him because that’s how I would have been in that situation. And she was the first one I noticed with what is now known as a Karen haircut which makes her immediately unsympathetic.

I think the only reason anybody watched Kid Nation was in the hope that it would devolve into Lord of the Flies. It never did. Watching the whole season was about as exciting as watching a NASCAR race without a crash.

There was 2014’s Utopia. It didn’t even make it through its first season. I remember we had a thread about it here and everyone hated it (I’m sure we all hate watched it). They didn’t choose people to be on the show who might be good at sustaining a 15-person utopia. They just chose people who would be whacky on camera. They needed Survivor but instead chose Jersey Shore.

I’ve heard that when reality shows were at their peak, somebody actually tried to sell a show based on the concept of a bunch of orphans competing against each other for a chance to get adopted by a couple. Sort of the equivalent of the Bachelor/Bachelorette series only with adoption being the prize rather than marriage.

To their credit, every network they approached said this idea was horrifying and turned them down.

I never watched this show, but it too was a trainwreck in every way from day one. The thing I heard more than everything else put together was that the dad totally triggered an awful lot of gaydars, so maybe there was something to it.

The people who have high-order multiples who stay together, or if they don’t, lead scandal-free lives, keep their kids off reality TV.

Still, I can see the appeal. There must be a huge financial incentive when you’re suddenly dealing with multiples and are overwhelmed by the magnitude of such a life change. Especially if they are pitching it to you like, “Just let us film your experience and you’ll never have to worry about feeding and clothing your eight children for the rest of their lives.” I never watched the show but for all I know they were perfectly normal people before their kids were born.

That was 2008, which I remember because TLC (The Learning Channel!) kept airing marathon broadcasts instead of my reality show, “The Singing Office,” and pissing me off. We recorded our competition episode on Mother’s Day, and they didn’t run it until August.

Spoiler Alert: my team lost, I drove the family home past midnight, and reported to work for my brand-new USPS job at 7:00 Monday morning. They shot our reaction to the announcement twice (once for winning, once for losing). If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have had the presence of mind to throw a tantrum and quit when they said the win went to the other guys.

I thought that fleetingly once, then I thought, they were people who didn’t choose selective reduction on learning they were having a litter.

I don’t know whether all their kids are healthy or not; maybe they are. But the odds of delivering more than three and having them all alive and healthy are very slim, and get slimmer the more there are. Attempting high-order multiple births just seems very selfish to me.

I didn’t know it was possible to even do that. Elect to abort some but not others?

It’s very possible. As she said, in cases of really multiple pregnancies the odds are that some won’t make it to term. By selectively aborting, you give the remaining fetuses (fetus? feti?) a higher chance of survival.

Yes. It has to be done pretty early, and there was no picking or choosing-- the last I heard; it was just a lottery; they select the embryos that are most accessible at the time. I actually know someone who had the procedure and has healthy twins. She’s very glad. Apparently, they can be much more selective now, though, and select an embryo with serious defects, while leaving a viable one.

Selective reduction.

I remember “Queen for a Day” from back in the '50s. One of my great-aunts loved it, but I considered it one of the most repugnant tv shows of all time. According to Wiki:

"The show was not without its critics for exploiting people’s hardships for profit. Veteran television writer Mark Evanier has called the program “one of the most ghastly shows ever produced.” He further described it as “tasteless, demeaning to women, demeaning to anyone who watched it, cheap, insulting and utterly degrading to the human spirit.”

Kinda sounds like Extreme Home Makeover took a page from that show. The person with the hardest luck gets a swanky new home tailored to their needs and preferences.

I admit Extreme Home Makeover was one of my guilty pleasures. It always made me cry. Knowing as I do now, that the shiny new homes inevitably shouldered new homeowners with mortgages they could not afford, just makes it depressing.

Becki Dilley, mother of the first American sextuplets to all survive infancy, said, “I couldn’t do it. I had bonded with those five little heartbeats.” The “five” is not a typo; she was believed to be expecting quintuplets until the 5th baby was born, the doctor reached in to remove the placentas, and instead grabbed a foot and said, “There’s another baby” and the team said, “That’s not funny” and she replied, “No, it isn’t” and displayed a very unexpected Baby F. I should add that one of them recently became the first sextuplet to ever earn an MD degree. Another is the first sextuplet pharmacist, and yet another was, as of this story’s appearance, on her way to becoming the first sextuplet attorney.

This family did make several appearances on shows like “20/20”, and wrote a book. AFAIK, they are also still together.

Shortly after the McCaughey septuplets were born in the late 1990s, a local couple appeared on my local TV’s news because they’d had a septuplet pregnancy a few years earlier, and also chose not to reduce. They said, “We are not religious people and we both have very strong pro-choice views; we chose not to do it because we didn’t want to” and even though she miscarried the entire pregnancy within a matter of days, she still felt they had done the right thing for them. They later had a healthy singleton.

The Van Houten sextuplets, in Michigan, were born naturally over a span of 10 days between 23 and 25 weeks’ gestation, and several of them are disabled, two of them very severely. Interestingly, they had a naturally-conceived baby a few years later, their 7th child - and then a few years after that, their father died suddenly from a heart attack. He wasn’t even 40 years old.

The story gets worse. A couple years later, their mother married her chiropractor, who had 5 kids from his first marriage that he is not allowed to see or contact, nor are they allowed to contact him! Gee whiz, what could go wrong with that? He did post on Facebook that he was allowed to attend his oldest daughter’s college graduation, on the condition that he sit in a certain area and not approach or speak to any of them if he saw them. Hmmmmm…

That was only the final form of the show. First came Extreme Makeover which was using extensive plastic surgery to make over people. It was a bad idea that eventually went horribly wrong. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition was a spin off. It started innocently enough. Normal people had their homes redone. I liked the show. It seemed like anyone had a chance to make it on the show. They fixed the houses with great workmanship and actually featured the work they did. It was a good resource to get home improvement ideas. Unfortunately it didn’t take long to evolve into what it became. The families had to have the worst sob story even. They didn’t renovate the house so much as knock it down and put up a new one quickly and cheaply. And what I always found as the most ridiculous, they would make a special room that a nine year old who was into trains would love with no thought about how he would like it in 2 years or 5.

Chrome Underground” was presented as reality TV from Discovery. Two guys ostensibly trying to be a shady version of “Wheeler Dealers” in Central America but the whole thing was so obviously scripted that I can’t help but wonder if Discovery was conned into allowing this into their lineup for that one season.

Off-Topic Blog like post TLDR

The “pro-life” stance weighs thin with me when you have upwards of a quad pregnancy.

The odds of upwards of four surviving are slim, and not having any with disabilities are slimmer. When I worked with disabled people, I worked with “twin” brothers, whose mother insisted on referring to them as “surviving triplets”-- one had been stillborn. One was blind, and could hear with hearing aids, but not normally, and SERIOUSLY needed signed language. He could walk, but his gait was a little odd, and he probably had either mild apraxia or CP. The other had severe CP, and was in a wheelchair, with intense physical therapy. At age three, he was just learning to use his electric chair, and also just learning to crawl with his therapy, a skill he would need if the chair ever failed. Ultimately it was hoped he would walk with crutches, maybe after surgery or Botox treatments (his type of disability is what Botox was invented for). He could see normally, and also wore hearing aids, but had much more gain through the aids than his brother.

When I was pregnant, I told my husband I would want to reduce above two. He read a couple of articles in medical journals, and totally agreed.

As far as “pro-life,” I had a friend who was pregnant with three naturally, one in one placenta, and two in another. One of the babies in the double placenta developed an infection, somehow, and died. The other was still alive, but a biopsy of the placenta showed it was toxic, and the second baby was doomed. To continue the pregnancy without interference meant dooming the currently safe fetus in it’s own, healthy placenta.

The mother (and I assume, really, both parents together) chose surgical removal of the infected placenta before it poisoned the whole uterine environment, because it was throwing off toxins as metabolites. It meant aborting the live fetus in the infected placenta, but it was doomed, because its placenta was dying.

This all happened just at the beginning of the second trimester, when healthy fetuses could no longer be aborted, but unhealthy ones could. The goal was always to save the singlet in the separate placenta. My friend needed to spend a month or so on bedrest, but carried the singlet to term.

She (the singlet) is a freshman in college now, on an academic scholarship, a real character, planning to major in chemistry, but minor in theater. She says she plans to spend her 20s trying to make it in acting, but be able to support herself doing something a lot better than waitressing while she tries, and if she can’t support herself by acting by the time she’s 30, she’s going to go to grad school and study pharmacology and become a researcher.

She’s a real character: plays guitar, and taught music in the religious school when she was still a high school senior, and was taking lot of college classes already-- finished high school with a lot of transfer credits; she may have entered college as a sophomore.

If her parents had “Let nature take it’s course,” she wouldn’t be here, and her mother probably would have ended up with a hysterectomy, so neither would her younger brother and sister.

FWIW, on the other side, I know quintuplets, aged 6, who are all physically healthy and mentally intact. But they are a little odd. They have very regimented lives, and seem to have trouble relaxing and just being kids. They also say some odd things from time to time-- it’s pretty obvious their grandparents are heavily involved in their upbringing, and from their influence, corporeal punishment is used, and frequently. I suspect that when you have five little ones, all the same age, it’s hard to take the time to communicate and reason at their level much, and so you have to resort to the quickest form of behavior modification available when you have a behavior that really must stop, NOW.

And FWIW, and OB will tell you that humans are not meant to have litters. high-order multiples, so much of the time, it’s effectively “always,” are the results of reproductive technology. The times that are not are so rare, all you can say about them is that they are a “non-zero event.”

Warning for RivkahChaya, avoid blogging off subject diversions from threads, especially in The Café Society for now on. You should know better.

I am also redacting your post.


As I was asked for more clarification:

You went off on long rambling off subject posts that detracted from the thread. Café is mostly meant to be light hearted and this was a mostly light hearted thread. You went deep diving into issues for GD or P&E.

The final post was more suitable to a blog than the Straight Dope. Completely out of place for the Op in the end. All over a show you say you never even watched.

How about Man vs. Wild? Bear Gryllis not only faked everything about his survivalist adventures, staying in hotel rooms overnight, he did a lot of overly dangerous stunts that were unnecessary and wrong to do in a real survival situation.