‘Jon & Kate Plus 8’ returns
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Thanks to the swirl of scandal, their TLC show will focus on more than their parenting.
Jon Caramanica writes:
For the last couple of weeks, the faces of Jon and Kate Gosselin have been everywhere -- peering out from tabloid covers, flashed on celebrity gossip shows, picked apart by blogs. Monday night, though, their TLC reality show “Jon & Kate Plus 8” returns for a fifth season, and the couple will reveal which face they’d like the world to see and to judge them by.
(Kate’s hair, of course, transcends medium.)
Last weekend the couple filmed segments for the premiere at their Wernersville, Pa., home in which they’ll address the swirl of scandal surrounding them: Jon’s late-night carousing and his alleged affair with a schoolteacher, and Kate’s alleged affair with her bodyguard. For the first time, the show won’t merely focus on how this couple manage parenting but also how they manage being a couple in real time.
But the fact that this needed to be done, with TLC cameras sweeping in to join the paparazzi cameras already planted in Pennsylvania, only highlights the schism between the events shown on reality shows and actual, verifiable truth. It’s been some time since producers of reality programming pretended to absolute reality in their presentation, but the Jon and Kate trauma highlights the difficulties created when people must exist in two spaces at once: actual day-to-day life, and filmed-and-edited slices thereof.
(Photo courtesy TLC)