14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not just the Duggars who are feeling the sting after their highly successful reality series, 19 Kids and Counting, was canceled last month. TLC’s parent company, Discovery Communications, is reporting a $19 million (€17.4 million) loss after they had to cut ties with the family and axe the show, following the Josh Duggar molestation scandal.
The “$19 Million and Counting” jokes write themselves, don’t they?
Impairment charges hit Discovery like a ton of bricks
19 Kids and Counting was TLC’s biggest brand before police records were published in the media in May, relating to a series of incidents in 2002, when a then-teenager Josh molested 5 minor girls, 4 of whom were his sisters.
The family and the network initially stood their ground together, even though backlash was threatening to get out of hand. Josh was a minor when this happened, but the family covered up for him for years, even after authorities became involved.
TLC continued to back the Duggars when they saw that they were not without supporters, and for many weeks, it thought their large fanbase might actually be able to save the show. Meanwhile, the Duggars went into major damage control mode: their defense was that this had been a “private, family matter,” which they handled privately, as a family.
They also said that, because Josh was a minor, he couldn’t have possibly been a pedophile or a child molester. “This wasn’t like rape or anything,” his father Jim Bob said in an interview.
Eventually, TLC pulled the plug on the reality show because it was losing advertisers by the handful and they got to a point where it was no longer profitable to keep it on the air.
According to The Wrap, Discovery Communications CFO Andrew Warren revealed in a post-earnings conference call that the cancelation of the show hit the network badly. He cited “higher restructuring and other charges this year of $19 million [€17.4 million], primarily due to content impairment charges of canceling TLC’s 19 Kids & Counting.”
TLC stands for The Learning Channel, by the way
The Duggar brand was the second major brand TLC lost in as many years. Only a few months before the Duggar story broke, the network had to cancel Here Comes Honey Boo Boo because the matriarch, June Thompson (aka Mama June), had been caught sleeping with a convicted pedophile.
Even more outrageously, the man had just finished a 10-year-sentence for molesting her own daughter when she was 8. He was one of June’s exes.
And these aren’t the only 2 recent cancelations because of scandals of this nature; they’re only the most mediated and the 2 that most impacted the network’s earnings.
TLC stands for The Learning Channel, and was aimed to be a network that offered entertainment that could double as education, in the sense that it offered an insight into areas of life that viewers would not have access to otherwise.
Something went seriously wrong along the way.