After the Jon and Kate Plus 8 announcement was made and after the Jon and Kate divorce papers have been filed, TLC has decided to pull Jon and Kate Plus 8 from the air. No new episodes of Jon and Kate Plus 8will be seen for a while, probably in order to give the Jon and Kate divorce proceedings a chance to settle down behind the scenes. The Jon and Kate divorce announcement was seen coming from a mile away, and yet TLC didn’t prepare itself well enough to deal with the fallout from bad publicity that the show is now receiving. Ratings for Jon and Kate Plus 8 went up this season, but at what cost? Rumors that Jon and Kate Plus 8 was canceled seem a bit premature, but it could still be possible in the long run.
The announcement has been made by TLC, that the Jon and Kate Plus 8 announcement episode on June 22nd will be the last one until at least August, when the show may return to the network. Next Monday TLC will be airing a retrospective about Jon and Kate’s 10 years of marriage, and will air that in the time slot for Jon and Kate Plus 8. After that, the show will go on a forced hiatus, with a tentative date of August 3rd set for the next truly new episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8 to be shown. Until then, the show will of course be in repeats, allowing people to re-watch some of the “classic” episodes from the past.
Pulling the show from television, even for just a little while, is the right decision for TLC to be making at this point. They are receiving a lot of bad press for seemingly taking advantage of how the Gosselin family is self-imploding, and by promoting the problems that Jon and Kate Gosselin are having by turning it into “special episodes” is just putting a magnifying glass on the problem. The Gosselins are a family in turmoil, and what is about transpire doesn’t need to be on television, as it is time for these parents to start putting their children ahead of the show.
The reasons that both Jon and Kate Gosselin have claimed that they do this show is for their kids, and in the June 22nd episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8, they both stated that they don’t blame the show. The television show couldn’t have helped though, as it drained them of the free time that they could have been spending with their eight kids, and did lead to the public attention that they both claim is unfair. Hopefully things turn out well for the eight Gosselin children, but right now it looks like they will have a rough time of it, and none of that needs to be aired on television.
Source: EW Announcement
