We Need to Talk About TLC and the Public's Complicity in the Duggar Kids' Commodification

Reflections on Jill Duggar's Memoir, "Counting the Cost"

I hated the concept of the 19 Kids and Counting show from the moment I heard of it. I’ve long been convinced that from the very start - even leaving out the many scandals surrounding Josh Duggar - TLC’s hit reality show represented a deeply unethical invasion of the privacy of children too young, and too indoctrinated, to meaningfully consent to what they were getting into. Jill Duggar’s new memoir, Counting the Cost, resoundingly confirms all of my worst suspicions about the unholy alliance between IBLP-style religious fundamentalism, the secular entertainment industry, and audiences that were happy to be amused at the expense of the Duggars kids’ privacy, for years.

I was just entering my twenties when the Duggars made their entrance into the world of reality television. I never watched the show, but I became aware, through internet chatter and gossip magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms, of this family that looked so foreign to most of the world, but eerily familiar to me. I didn’t know that they were connected with Bill Gothard or IBLP, but the first picture I remember seeing of them - a shot of Michelle in a hospital gown, holding a newborn and surrounded by fifteen or so identically-dressed children - reminded me of old pictures of my own, very large, very homeschooling family.

For the next seven or eight years, through a cross-country move, marriage, having kids, and major shifts in my own theology, I watched the Duggars out of the corner of my eye. I never tuned in to the show, but I watched the world watch them. In the early years, I mostly saw ridicule, as blogs and online forums quickly sprung up for the express purpose of mocking them. A lot of the criticism was valid, but some of it was also mean-spirited and cruel. Even though I wasn’t impressed by the smiling facade that the Duggars presented for the cameras, I would wince when bloggers referred to the kids as “spawn,” or made fun of the way the family dressed or talked. It was one thing to criticize Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar, but their nineteen kids hadn’t asked to be born, let alone be put on TV.

In her book, Jill Duggar tells her side of the story about growing up in a strict, IBLP-influenced home, and doing it in front of TV cameras for nine years of her life. There were “perks” to being on TV, she writes. There were all-expense-paid, televised grocery runs, international travel, and the network even helped pay for a 7,000 square foot, new construction home, since it doubled as the show’s primary set. But as the Duggar children’s lives became more and more public, Jill learned to keep one thing private: any discomfort that might reflect poorly on her family or the television show that funded their lives.

The Duggar party line on the reality show that dictated their lives for almost a decade has always been, “It’s a family ministry.” The narrative that opening their lives up to the public was a family decision was a fiction that audiences were happy to believe, but it was just that: a fiction. Counting the Cost takes us behind the scenes to the family conference where Jill’s parents discussed an early opportunity at media exposure following Jim-Bob’s failed senate run:

A week or two later, Pops got a call from a magazine that wanted to know more about our family and run a feature about us. Pops wasn’t sure at first … But he and Mom prayed about it, then told the rest of us that he wanted us all to pray and see if we felt that God was opening up a new opportunity for our family. We did what we’d been asked to do, and we all dutifully agreed that this was something God wanted us to do. Not that we had much choice in the matter.

An outsider might be confused by Jill’s claim that she and her siblings didn’t have a choice, when it appears that they were being given a choice. But coming from a similar background, I understood immediately what Jill meant.

The Duggars brought their children up under the teaching of Bill Gothard, who taught that obedience to authority was all-important, and his definition of obedience was broad. Obedience involved not just obeying explicit commands of an authority, but obeying even their unspoken desires. If you knew what your authority wanted you to do, you shouldn’t need to wait to be told to do it. Jim-Bob did not say, “You’re going to be on TV whether you like it or not” because he didn’t need to. His children had already been trained to do what he wanted without even being explicitly told to. And when you combine this with the spiritualized way that Jim-Bob always talked about the show, it’s not hard to see why children who were raised to be deeply conscientious in their religious practice wouldn’t even consider saying “no” to anything their authority referred to as “a God-given opportunity.”

The sheer novelty of a family so large, and the logistics of their unusual home life, captured audience’s attention for a while, but that wasn’t enough to keep the show running forever. As 19 and Counting became more successful, Jill writes that TLC urged the family to dig deep for new plot lines:

The more I experienced what it meant to allow your life to become the focus of a reality TV show, the more I understood that while it was still a ministry for Pops and the rest of us, it was something entirely different for the network that created us … No matter how much Pops talked about … the potential impact of reaching millions with the message of Christ, for the company paying the bills, we were there to entertain. We had to keep things fresh, and we knew that if we didn’t provide the viewers with content they engaged with, there would be no show.

Just as things were threatening to get stale, the older Duggars entered a new phase of their lives - courtship - which opened up a whole vista of possibilities for the show. TLC had no scruples in taking full advantage of this era, and in later seasons 19 and Counting became a full-blown, fundie soap opera, with the film crew working behind the scenes to make sure that the “reality” they were filming came together as an interesting and cohesive plot. “A guy asking Pops’ permission to marry a Duggar girl, or the proposal itself, were some of the best TV moments, but there was practically no room for spontaneity,” Jill writes. Even the Duggars’ strict, no-contact rules were sometimes laid aside in the interest of TLC’s script.

There are plenty of people willing to put their private lives out there to be on TV, but the Duggar family represented a unique opportunity for TLC to take advantage of their young stars’ built-in naivete and compliance. In IBLP, romantic relationships aren’t very private to begin with, since “courtship” usually involves chaperoned dates and, in the Duggars’ case, monitored phone calls and text messages. I myself have been the annoying little sibling sent to chaperone my older siblings’ dates, so I can imagine how it probably wasn’t a huge leap for the Duggar kids to accept that a film crew would be tagging along whenever they spent time with a prospective spouse. Audiences ate it up. Romance is always a crowd-pleaser, but the constraints involved in a Duggar romance added novelty, drama and more than a hint of voyeurism: a major moment in every wedding episode was when the couple would share, on national television, their first kiss ever.

When Jill and Derick got married, Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar clearly felt that they weren’t losing a daughter, but gaining a son - and a cast member. In IBLP circles, starting a family business is the ultimate way to promote “family togetherness,” because by hiring within the family, the patriarch can keep the family close (and under control) even into adulthood. 19 Kids and Counting was the ultimate family business, and there was never any question that the Dillards wouldn’t be a part of it. In fact, Jim-Bob didn’t leave it to chance: in the book’s biggest bombshell, Jill writes that on the eve of her wedding, her father presented her with the signature page of a thirty-page contract that obligated her to the show for the next five years, and got her to sign it without realizing what it was. Although contractually obligated, Jill was not being paid for her contribution to the “family ministry” as an unmarried adult daughter, nor would she and Derick be paid after they were married.

Jill wasn’t the first Duggar to get married - Josh and Anna had already been married for six years. But it’s no secret that the Duggar women - not Jim-Bob or his sons - were the ones who kept the show afloat, and Jill was the first daughter to be married. When Jill found out she was pregnant about a month after hers and Derick’s wedding, she knew what would be expected from her:

Josh and his wife Anna had three kids by the time Derick and I married, and Mom had given birth six times already since we started filming, so there was already a clear path that we had to follow - not just involving some media outlet being given exclusive rights to the official announcement, but also how we told those closest to us. First, we were supposed to tell the producers then - when they were ready to capture it on film - we were allowed to tell our parents.

But Derick, unlike Jill, hadn’t been raised on the set of a hyper-fundamentalist reality TV show, and balked: “If it’s this intense around the announcement, what’s it going to be like with the birth?”

I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to tell him. Mom had learned how to manage the expectations of the show when it came to giving birth - giving them access but being firm about what shots they were allowed to take. Josh’s wife, Anna, had had problems with the crew using footage from one of her births that she’d specifically told them she did not authorize. They cut it out for reruns, but with later births, the footage was often added back in as part of flashback sequences.

Jill and Derick fought hard for a compromise, and ultimately their first child’s birth was filmed by Michelle and Jana instead of a film crew. Jill recalls even feeling guilty that Derick had snuck in a video camera of their own to take images that they could keep private.

The Dillards might have been able to fade into relative obscurity, and exit gracefully from the show, if it hadn’t been for the In Touch story that came out in 2015, detailing Jill, Jessa’s and some of the other girls’ abuse by Josh in 2006. One of the more controversial elements of the book is Jill’s harsh words for In Touch, and the Springdale police department, who leaked the police report that detailed hers and her sisters’ sexual abuse. Jill writes,

They had published everything … But it wasn’t only presented in the cold, forensic language of the initial report. This was tabloid journalism at its worst. The most graphic, the most scandalous, the most painful parts of the story had received the greatest prominence. It was written wish one aim and one aim only: entertainment.

Jill uses the word “entertainment” in reference to the media buzz surrounding this story more than once, which has earned her some criticism from reviewers. For instance, Rich Juzwiak writes at Jezebel:

Far be it from me to give tabloids any credit for their benevolence, but clearly there was more to it than just “entertainment”—and few would describe the details of child abuse as such. That reporting was obviously a way to shatter the deceptive “model family” facade the Duggars tried so hard to uphold.

I think there was more to the world’s interest in the Josh Duggar story than mere entertainment - after all, I was following it myself, because it was another piece of the puzzle I was trying to put together about IBLP and Bill Gothard. But I can also understand why Jill characterizes it the way that she does.

I first found out about the Duggars from a seedy gossip blurb on the Yahoo homepage. And even though I never watched a single episode of the show, I always knew what was going on with them because of how relentlessly the media covered them. From the beginning, the Duggars’ famously strict home life has always made them easy targets for the gossip mill. With most celebrities, you have to catch them doing something dramatic, like cheating on their spouse, to make headlines, but with the Duggars (especially the Duggar daughters) all it would take was a slight deviation - real or imagined - from the family code of conduct. Things that couldn’t possibly be construed as “news” about anybody else, were “shocking revelations” if they were done by anyone with the last name “Duggar”.

Some of the coverage was misguidedly supportive, like the plethora of news blurbs celebrating the Duggar girls’ various “rebellions” against the family dress code. But some of it was just plain cruel. The Duggar kids not only became celebrities, they became the kind of celebrities that people love to hate. At Jezebel, the Duggar kids were derisively referred to as “spawn” and “assholes,” over things as trivial as feeding a dog frozen breastmilk. Their private lives were openly speculated on, like when Hollywood Gossip spread completely unfounded rumors that Jessa was unhappy in her marriage to Ben Seewald.

All this is to say: Jill isn’t pulling the accusation that the story of her sexual assault was reported “for entertainment” out of thin air. There’s context to her impression. Both before and after 2015, the media took full advantage of the situation that Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar had put their children in, and the public was always clamoring for more. The family was at the center of an entire eco-system of private and professional gossip hawkers, who benefited at the expense of the Duggar kids’ privacy and dignity. And the vast majority of the time, the public wasn’t following out of concern for their welfare: they were following to be entertained.

Jim-Bob Duggar, with his celebrity and instant face recognition, makes an appealing villain, and I’m not denying that he, along with Michelle Duggar, are primarily to blame for their children’s loss of privacy. But in my opinion 19 Kids and Counting is a much bigger story than one, hypocritical fundamentalist. Every day, TLC saw firsthand the kind of controlling environment that the Duggar children lived in, and instead of seeing a cause for concern, they saw an opportunity for profit, in the form of compliant child performers who were guaranteed to say, “Yes, sir” and “Yes ma’am” to whatever was asked of them. Gossip reporters pounced on their every move for clicks. And none of that would have been possible if there wasn’t a demand for that kind of content in the first place. The public saw the way that the Duggar kids were being controlled and commodified, year after year, episode after episode, and instead of helping them, we grabbed popcorn and watched.