Shiny Happy Tragedies
Dear Wags,
Show business involves the routine, ruthless exploitation of innocents. Hard experience taught me kids do not belong in it. Not if they are preternaturally gifted actors. Not if they open their mouths and sing like angels. Not if their cuteness melts the hardest heart. And certainly not because their parents want them to be reality stars.
Point out how well-adjusted Jodie Foster is all you want. Children —all children— deserve lives of sloppy anonymity. In the past decade, we somehow decided that it’s perfectly fine for kids to pimp themselves out on social media as if they were Adore Loomis in The Day of the Locust, auditioning for stardom they’ll never attain. It’s unsavory and frequently tragic. And, it seems to have sparked a generational mental health crisis, as Jonathan Haidt of After Babel keeps pointing out.
Anybody who has logged time with child performers could have predicted this. Kids who grow up on camera have long suffered from maladies —anxiety, depression, substance abuse, etc. — that now plague growing numbers of ordinary young people. This is what happens when you condition the vulnerable to believe that attention is the same as love and that life’s purpose is to shill for it.
Just when they are forming a sense of self, show business children are bombarded with the idea that they are commodities with values defined by strangers. If they succeed, they become cash cows for their families, which perverts their relationships with those they trust. Their parents invariably will tell you that they are only letting their offspring prance and shimmy because they want to. It’s their dream!
Well, some kids crave heroin, too.
It’s too easy to draw a distinction between classier gigs and tatty reality TV as if a 7-year-old coached to mug for the camera has any idea of the difference. But reality programming was a precursor to the ubiquitous prostitutions of social media, opening the gates of hell to more fragile people. Among them were the Duggar children, who couldn’t have possibly known what they were getting into.
In a small way, I helped burnish the legend now being dissected in the Amazon docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets. What is covered in the show won’t be revelatory to those who worked on a slew of stories about Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their enormous family. The Duggars were stars of the TLC show 19 Kids and Counting and before that, specials showcasing a few of Michelle’s many births. They were a gold mine for their network and the tabloids. That changed in 2015, when the eldest Duggar child, Josh, was accused of molesting four of his sisters and another child when he was 15.
The Duggars’ show was abruptly canceled. Josh is now serving 12 ½ years in prison on separate charges of possessing and receiving child pornography. The whole affair ought to unsettle those of us who churned out Duggar content. At the brand I worked for, the journalists who handled those stories were sharp and compassionate. They didn’t know about Josh’s crimes, but they did raise concerns about the family in the TLC show’s heyday. They wove critical notes into their reporting and explained the fringe fundamentalist sect the clan was part of. We were yoked to a giant promotional machine that exalted the family just the same.
The sweatshop workers at the heart of that enterprise were kids. Even if we were creeped out by Jim Bob, a small-time Republican politician and used car salesman from Tontitown, Ark., the children were fresh-faced and charming, innocents from a Laura Ingalls Wilder story plopped into the modern world. The offspring, especially the Duggar daughters, had star quality.
Jim Bob knew that, too. Shiny Happy People relies heavily on interviews with Jill Duggar Dillard, now 32, who has a lot to say about how badly she was used. Dillard claims the patriarch pushed his naïve offspring into exploitive contracts that would keep them filming in perpetuity, for a pittance. The molestation accusations against Josh Duggar surfaced years before the family became reality stars, but were covered up. When they were interviewed by Megyn Kelly in 2015, Jill and her sister Jessa downplayed the abuse charges to oblige their parents. “We knew we really needed to do it for our family,” she says now. Her sister, Jinger Duggar Vuolo, has also spoken out about escaping a “cult-like” environment.
The thrust of Shiny Happy People is that the Duggars were hucksters for the Institute for Basic Life Principles, a fundamentalist organization riven by its own sexual abuse allegations. The IBLP, and the associated Quiverfull doctrine which rejects all forms of birth control and family planning, are somewhere out beyond Pluto in relation to mainstream Christian belief. The group is obsessed with female obedience to male authority, which uncorks all sorts of medieval nastiness. The reality the Duggar daughters lived in was closer to The Handmaid’s Tale than Little House on the Prairie.
Which was there for anyone to Google. That didn’t stop executives from green-lighting 19 Kids and Counting and a sequel, Counting On, which starred Jill, who says she remained under her father’s thumb even after she was a married adult. She claims moments such as the birth of her first child were filmed without her understanding what she was agreeing to and with little compensation. “We were taken advantage of,” she says in the doc.
That’s a time-honored show business tradition. However bizarre the Duggars’ subculture was, they turned it into a gimmick — and rode it to the big time. For all that talk of family values, their kids paid the price. Now they are irrevocably cast in a horror show. “You’re out there, your story’s out there,” Jill Duggar says in the documentary. “I’d rather have some say in what that looks like.”
But of course you never really do. Once the camera rolls, life becomes a group project over which you have little control. And part of the soul goes, too.
