News Analysis: The Duggars built a wholesome reality TV empire on TLC. Now it's in ruins
Megyn Kelly, formerly of Fox News, interviews Jim Bob Duggar and Michelle Duggar of the TLC program “19 Kids and Counting” at their home in Tontitown, Ark. The interview followed the publication of a 2006 police report detailing molestation allegations against their eldest son, Josh.
The Discovery-owned channel became a reality TV juggernaut in the mid-2000s thanks to a spate of reality shows about large, unconventional and typically religious families living in small-town America. These included “17 Kids and Counting” — the title changed as the Duggars had more kids — and “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” which followed Jon and Kate Gosselin, a Pennsylvania couple with sextuplets and twins whose marital discord became a national obsession.
Produced by the North Carolina-based Figure 8 Films, “19 Kids and Counting” became a big hit, with ratings cresting as the older girls began to marry off. A record 4.4 million viewers watched Jill Duggar tie the knot with Derick Dillard in 2014, the network’s biggest audience since the debut of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” four years earlier.
The inexpensive reality TV subgenre popularized by the Duggars is a staple on the network to this day: The most visible of these current series is “Sister Wives,” about a polygamist with four wives and 18 kids. But there are others, such as “Outdaughtered,” which follows a Texas couple with six daughters, including a set of quintuplets; and “Welcome to Plathville,” about a Duggar-esque conservative Christian family in rural Georgia with nine flaxen-haired, home-schooled children.
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