What’s so great about Jon & Kate?
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 16, 2009 - 5 Comments
The real reason the show’s so popular is it’s the only one left that still features cute kids
Why did almost 10 million people watch the season premiere of TLC’s Jon & Kate Plus 8, the reality show about a couple raising eight children? Well, some of those viewers were driven to the show after reading all the tabloid stories alleging that Jon, the man of the house, had an affair; in an age when tabloids are cross-pollinated with reality TV, we couldn’t help tuning in to see the Pennsylvania couple admit that their marriage was in trouble. And yet the show didn’t start with Jon and Kate Gosselin discussing the peril of their marriage or denying that they’d had affairs. It began as the episodes usually begin, with their kids, announcing to us that “we’re turning five!”, laughing, jumping, and mugging for the camera. The real reason Jon & Kate has sustained itself for five seasons is that the eight Gosselin children are the real stars; it’s the only show left on television about the joys, fears and silliness of small children.
Jon and Kate’s eight-year-old twins and five-year-old sextuplets aren’t perfect kids: they play with their food, burp, call each other names and make each other cry. But unlike the horrible children on other reality shows like Supernanny, the Gosselin kids are always portrayed as sympathetic and sweet. They’re also presented as individualized characters, starting with an early episode in which Jon and Kate defined the personalities of each child, calling one “our professor,” another one “Mommy’s helper.”
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Newsmakers of the week
By Lianne George - Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 4 Comments
The GG raw food rivalry, Veronica finally wins Archie, and Kanye West is a “non-reader”
Seal of approval Inuit leaders are delighted by the positive publicity that Governor General Michaëlle Jean has attracted to the seal hunt ever since she appeared on camera last week snacking on a freshly slaughtered pup. During a visit to Nunavut, Jean partook in the skinning of a seal with a traditional ulu blade, and sampled a piece of its heart, calling it “fresh” and “delicious.” (According to Jean, this delicacy has the texture of sushi, but with a meatier taste.) One restaurant in Montreal told the CBC that sales of its seal appetizer have doubled since the video emerged. Adrienne Clarkson—in Nunavut last week, like Jean, for a symposium hosted by her husband John Raulston Saul—doesn’t see what the big deal is. She’s been eating raw food in the region for almost 40 years, and it never made headline news. “It’s nothing new to me, okay?” she told reporters. “I have a lovely sealskin coat . . . I’ve eaten raw food since 1971—and there you are.”
She said she wanted a revolution
For the first time since Sara Jane Moore, 77, was imprisoned for attempting to assassinate president Gerald Ford in 1975, she admitted last week that her actions were “a serious error.” Back in the mid-’70s, Moore, then a 45-year-old single mother, says she became caught up in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement in California. “I became immersed in it,” she told Matt Lauer, the host of NBC’s Today Show. “We were saying the country needed change. I genuinely thought that [shooting Ford] might trigger that new revolution in this country.” It was on Sept. 22, 1975, that Moore fired on Ford as he greeted a crowd in San Francisco. She missed his head by mere feet. After serving 32 years in jail, six of which she spent in solitary confinement, Moore was released on parole in 2007. Over time, she said, she “began to realize that I had let myself be used.” When host Lauer asked her why she was speaking out now, she said, “I think that one gets tired of being thought of as a kook, a monster, an alien.”
