Picket Fence Post

For your Friday Funnies viewing pleasure:

What do you think of Kate Gosselin’s attempt to lighten the mood and poke fun at herself?

Jon +  Kate Not So-Great

As difficult as she’s been making it, I’m starting to feel badly for Kate Gosselin, from Jon “Hey I’m only 32 and for dates” & Kate Plus 8.

I’ve already written about how disappointing and breathtakingly difficult it must’ve been for Jon and Kate Gosselin to have their marriage crumble in front of national television cameras for a reality show whose producers seek to get the best ratings, not take care of a family in trouble.

Soon after they announced that they were divorcing, my feelings of melancholy for both Kate and Jon started to shift. It had a lot to do with the photos and footage of Jon cavorting with several different twentysomething gals late into the evenings, one of whom is the daughter of the cosmetic surgeon who gave Kate her tummy tuck in the first season of Jon & Kate.

Then Kate decided to provide an exclusive interview to the Today Show, and the program exploited Kate’s pain, seemingly trying to goad her into crying. (Wrote about it here.) Following the interview, anonymous NBC staffers complained to the Chicago Sun-Times about Kate’s behavior following the interview, saying, “We get virtually all of the world’s biggest egos coming through here. But Kate was one of the most unpleasant I’ve seen in working here for many years.”

I now wish that this family would simply cease providing interviews to anyone and just pull up the draw bridge to protect those eight young kids and, frankly, themselves. I wish they’d stop providing fodder for anyone to write about, live their lives as quietly as possible. Aside from doing the TLC show — payment for which is likely providing the family with the funds to put those eight kids through college — I wish Jon and Kate would just stop talking about their impending divorce and love lives and just focus on providing TLC with footage of raising eight kids, not on tabloid sideshow trash.

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Found this delightfully ironic Miami image to the left on Dave Barry’s blog, which is always a good place to find a funny or two.

Meanwhile, I saw the spoof video about the Jon & Kate Gosselin marital debacle on Salon this week and felt guilty about the fact that I laughed while I watched it. Given the media overload on all things sextuplets, it was amusing, in a dark and twisted kind of way.

Friday Funnies . . . because parents need to laugh. At least once a week.

This has gotten out of hand. Way, waaaaay out of hand. This disgusting orgy of media attention lavished upon Jon and Kate Gosselin, the parents of eight kids (twins and sextuplets) who all star in a TLC reality show, Jon & Kate Plus Eight.

The couple — which is obviously going through hell right now — is likely going to get a divorce. (If I were making a bet with a Las Vegas bookie, it’d be a losing bet to wager that they’ll still be married at this time next year.) Like many married couples, Jon and Kate appear, from all reports and by their own descriptions, to have grown apart and have realized they want different things in life. That happens. It’s a tragedy when a family breaks up, but it happens, everywhere in America. However, unlike other married couples with children, the Gosselins have made the realization that their marriage is in trouble while they’re in front of burning lights of national television cameras.

However instead of humanely giving them space to work through their difficulties, TLC is milking the de facto separation (the couple doesn’t spend much time together in the home) for ratings. (See the network’s promo it ran for the fifth season below.) And for this, TLC has been rewarded with a spike in viewership as compared to last season’s ratings.

And the media should hang its collective heads in shame for relentlessly going after this family like a dog with a bone. In addition to frequent segments about this couple’s break-down on national television (about which I lamented in a column last week on Mommy Track’d) in which folks chime in and assign blame to one partner or the other, magazine editors have gone hog wild, splashing sensational photos and headlines of Jon and Kate on their covers, as if what the Gosselins are going through is more important and worthy of intimate dissection than anything else going on in America.

US Weekly has put a member of the Gosselin family on its cover for six weeks in a row, as it peddles rumors of infidelity, short-tempers and bad behavior. People has had several Gosselin covers as well, with its most recent issue featuring Jon’s side of the story. (Kate’s side was presented two weeks ago.)

Does no one in this mess have a conscience when it comes to the well being of the eight Gosselin kids? Not, apparently TLC. (For the record, I don’t know if the Gosselins are compelled — due to contractual obligations — to continue shooting this show and are soldiering forward as best as they can, or if they have an out clause and COULD back out of this show for the sake of their family, even though the show provides the 10-member family with its income in a difficult economy in which jobs are hard to get.) Not the magazine editors nor the other media outlets who are making hay out of this family’s agony.

Instead of anointing Jon or Kate (or both) as the villain, it’s my sincerest wish that someone would pull the plug on the program and that, for the sake of the eight young children who are blameless victims in this three-ring circus, the media would just back the heck off. But if the Jon and Kate drama provides ratings to TLC, sells magazines during a troubled time for the publishing industry and provides an income for the Gosselins, apparently, the kids don’t really factor into this equation.

UPDATE: The chorus of folks calling for this show to be canceled is growing.

Today, New York Daily News columnist Richard Huff wrote:

“TLC executives should step up and do the right thing — kill Jon & Kate Plus 8, the TV series. Now. . . This isn’t about the family itself, but the show. And by that measure, given what the marital strive has done to the show, Jon & Kate Plus 8 has lost its way. From a purely TV perspective, the show is toast.”

Meanwhile, at least one child psychologist publicly pleaded for the show to end for a different reason. A member of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry told the odious Us Magazine that it’s unhealthy for the Gosselin children to be “exposed and exploited” by reality TV. If you adhere to that reasoning, that would mean a whole lot of other “mega-family” reality shows ought to get the axe as well, like the 18 and Counting show.

Image credit: US Weekly/via Huffington Post.