Jon & Kate’s Fourth Wall: It Was Invisible All Along
On Monday night, TLC aired the season premiere of Jon & Kate Plus 8 — the pride of Wernersville, PA — and the fourth wall came tumbling down. Jon and Kate got all meta on us, going on the record about the scandal that has descended upon their brood. They talked about the paparazzi and what it’s like to show up on tabloid covers (in case you couldn’t guess, it sucks). Kate cried. Jon became withdrawn. This has all been reported extensively elsewhere. But what got buried beneath the scandal is that the season premiere was originally set to be a celebration of the sextuplets’ fifth birthday. If not for their parents’ indiscretions, it would have been their day, not a platform for a parental standoff. How would it have been without the “scandal?” Perhaps something like this…
Hannah: Mommy! Mommy! It’s time for the party!
Colin: Yay!
Leah: I want ice cream!
Kate: JON! Where are you? I need help!
Jon: What is it this time?
Kate: JON! Did you put the piñatas in the van? JON!
Jon: I don’t remember. Why don’t you go check?
Kate: Ugh! I have to do everything around here!
Jon: I just spent two and a half hours getting the kids dressed!
Kate: What?! That’s what the network hires the nannies for! That’s not our job! You should know better!
Jon: Kate! You can’t talk about that! We’re on TV! You can’t talk about being on TV!
Kate: Oh yes I can! We’re doing this for the children!
Sigh. Regardless of the scandal, the show has always acknowledged that it is more than an armada of producers and camcorders following the Gosselins in their daily lives; it is an entity that influences the activities within those lives. The glamorous junket vacations were always evidence of this; Jon and Kate readily admitted that without the show, the family would not have been able to afford them on their own. The fourth wall was never there to begin with, not in the way that we as an audience secretly hoped it was. We willingly suspended our disbelief, and we hoped that Jon and Kate would be able to maintain the act as a modern day real-life Cleaver family existing in a no-man’s land between reality and “reality.” It was simply an impossible balancing act between personal egos, public personas, and the desire to do right by their kids. By confronting the issue in “confessional”-style interviews rather than an uncontrolled mid-dialogue blowup, Jon and Kate took a preemptive step to maintain the status quo; unexpectedly, that makes the who situation seem staged and artificial, despite the obviously real emotions involved. Regardless of where this leads, the sad part is that the children won’t see any cake or balloons in the near future. Because they already aired that episode.
