14 DAY TRIAL // To those of you still thinking that reality television is “reality” and that it’s not scripted in the least, here’s something to burst your bubble: proof has emerged that Kate Gosselin’s now defunct TLC show, Jon & Kate Plus 8, which later became just Kate Plus 8, was fake.
Robert Hoffman, former Star editor who befriended Jon Gosselin and conducted a lengthy investigation into Kate Gosselin and her rise to fame, finally got to publish his book “Kate Gosselin: How She Fooled the World, the Rise and Fall of a Reality TV Queen,” on which he’d been working since 2009.
He’s also lifting the lid on Kate’s reality show, telling Radar Online that he has actual proof of how scripted the TLC reality show was.
We should probably note that, in 2011, asked on camera if the show was exactly what was happening in her and her kids’ life on a daily basis, Kate left no room for doubt. “We’re not scripted. You heard me. We are not scripted. We’re living. The kids run in and out of the frame and they just live,” she said, as cited by the same media outlet.
Well, Hoffman proves that, while the show wasn’t scripted as scripted programming actually is, it wasn’t “reality” either. He provides examples of how producers would write down Kate’s voiceovers which, at the same time, served as guidelines for a story.
In other words, whenever the Gosselins started shooting, they already knew what would happen next, because they were receiving instructions from the producers as regards the plotlines. This included playdates, the adventure of getting snowed in en route to the airport, chaos before bedtime, fights between siblings, and pretty much everything else.
This is actually common practice in reality television (because, otherwise, episodes would feel pointless and boring), but Kate always maintained that she didn’t even do that. It’s now coming back to bite her in the you-know-what.
“[She got] ‘scripted,’ voice-over assignments, written for and given to [her], telling her exactly what to say,” Hoffman tells Radar. There is no evidence to suggest the show was scripted “in the strictest sense of the word,” but it was “totally scheduled with story lines planned in advance.”
“There was absolutely nothing ‘organic,’ normal, or natural about the Gosselin children being filmed,” Hoffman continues.
Whichever way you look at it, the conclusion is just one: scripted in its entirety or just “scheduled,” the show wasn’t real, it wasn’t a reflection of what really went on in the Gosselin household at the time.
Again, such a revelation is actually a well-known fact in the industry. Even people who regularly tune in on reality shows do so fully knowing that a certain amount of scripting and manipulation through editing are present.
However, had Kate not protested that much, saying that she was different from every other reality star out there, perhaps she would have been safe from criticism after all this time.