For most of its 18-season run, Sister Wives has been a remarkably boring show. Pick an episode at random and you’re probably about to watch 45 minutes of suburban tedium: estate planning, meal prepping and a lot of filler footage of kids running around big, carpeted houses. But now, even the most mundane episodes feel like they might merit a closer look following the death of one of the show’s former child stars.
Sister Wives, on TLC since 2010 (and now Max), explores the polygamist Kody Brown’s marriage to his now-ex-wives, Meri, Janelle and Christine, and his last remaining wife, Robyn. It also shows their collective 18 children – some of whom have been on television for their entire lives. What started as light patriarchy propaganda took a darker turn in the last few seasons, as Kody belittled his wives, berated his children, and seemed to harden in his archaic views that he alone should be the head of his several households. Embittered that some of his children were siding with their mothers, he began demanding apologies from the elder children, who refused to acquiesce. By season 18, in 2023, Janelle and Kody’s son Garrison had fallen so out of favor with his dad that he was talking openly about their estrangement. “Since I last talked to Dad, I bought a house, I got into school, and I bought [a] car,” he said to two of his moms and a host of his siblings, matter-of-factly. “You know what, Robyn? Have him. We don’t need Dad any more.”
Garrison and his dad would never reconcile. This month, Garrison was found dead in an apparent suicide. He was 25.
And so Sister Wives fans find themselves stuck in a double bind: many of them, clearly, have parasocial relationships with the family that cannot easily be cut short (one Redditor posted about how she planned to “pretend” that Garrison wasn’t dead because the truth was too painful to acknowledge). Before Garrison’s death, they had happily speculated about when Robyn might leave Kody or how Kody’s behavior was affecting the kids stuck in the middle. Now, they’re wondering whether they ever should have watched a show that traded on the traumas of children for the bulk of their conscious lives in the first place.
The show fans first tuned into was inoffensively bland – about four wives (enthusiastically) managing three merged households, with Kody as the sun they all orbited around. Eventually, factions and fissures formed: Meri, the neglected first wife who only bore one child, was briefly seduced by an online catfish. Janelle and Christine got closer as they distanced themselves from Kody, moving out into their own residences, far enough away that Kody would lose day-to-day access to the kids. The show became less about how many tomato cans Christine hoarded in her giant prepper pantry, and more about how Kody seemed to reserve special treatment for his final, and youngest, wife (especially since Robyn is the only one with children who are still underage). As the pandemic settled in and Kody was forced to make determinations about which household he would spend the most time in, his family started treating him less like a patriarch and more like a nuisance. One of his wives, Janelle, opted to live in an RV, alone. Christine moved to another state. Several of his kids, like Garrison, became estranged from him.
“Janelle did sign up for patriarchy. She agreed wholeheartedly that she would run her will into mine,” Kody said defiantly in a 2022 episode, a tone that would steadily overtake his entire television personality. “I’m at a point in my life where I don’t have time to waste on people who won’t respect me.” In another recent season, Kody refused to travel with Christine for their daughter’s scoliosis surgery. A few episodes later, he traveled to officiate a friend’s wedding. As Sister Wives progressed and many of the Brown children grew into adults, it remained tough to root for Kody.
Sister Wives’ season 18 premiere got its highest ratings in a decade, with four million people tuning in. (It’s one of those shows that no one wants to admit to watching, but it’s also a show too popular for no one to be watching.) Garrison’s death, during the filming of season 19, was a shock for these fans. In the immediate aftermath, Janelle and Kody posted tributes to Garrison on Instagram; the comments on those posts are closed. But most of the other photos Kody has posted still have open comments, and angry viewers have flocked there to lay blame at his feet. They seem to want to hold only Kody (and sometimes, Robyn) responsible for Garrison’s death, as if suicide can ever be attributed to a single factor, as if mental health crises don’t arise from a combination of issues beyond the ones strangers assess from afar. “Kody, I foresaw your son’s suicide the moment he talked about all the things he’d accomplished without your support or love,” one user wrote on an old post. Others are more direct, and more cruel: “It is largely your fault. That is a fact. You are a failure as a father.”
On Reddit, the discourse is more complicated. On r/SisterWives or r/SisterWivesFans or r/SisterWivessnark or even r/FundieSnarkUncensored (a subreddit about Christian fundamentalism), thousands of people are picking apart the Sister Wives archive, 14 years deep, in search of evidence: scenes showing how pained Garrison was by his estrangement from Kody, and how frustrated he was with his father’s Covid rules, which he felt deprioritized his own birth mother. Real Housewives of Beverly Hills fans did this after Taylor Armstrong’s husband died by suicide, and Love Island fans did it when several people died by suicide after appearing on the franchise. In these cases, fans are hoping to find answers to why someone would kill themselves, if it was preventable, and above all, if the show was somehow to blame. No one knows why Garrison killed himself, but like true crime sleuths, fans will keep searching for clues where there are, ultimately, none.
Nestled amongst those amateur sleuths is a third group of viewers fretting over their own participation in a reality TV program that perhaps didn’t aid Garrison’s mental health. It’s easy to justify watching a show built on drama – they made it for us! – until real tragedy strikes. “Reality shows featuring minor participants need to end,” one user wrote on Reddit. “I can think of no reality show that had minor participants where the children came out of that experience healthier … TLC has to be stopped.” One of Garrison’s friends posted a commemoration of his life on Instagram with “#cancelsisterwives”.
While YouTubers like Ruby Franke are starting to face consequences for the ways they exploited their children, reality television continues to foist minors into the public eye, usually between warring parents. Like in Jon & Kate Plus 8. Or Welcome to Plathville. Or 1000-lb Sisters. Or even any of the Housewives franchises currently host to a divorce narrative. (In the finale of this season’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Kyle Richards’s teenage daughter bursts into tears on camera, hiding her face, while her parents tell her they’re separating.) Garrison was only 11 when Sister Wives premiered. To watch the progression of a child’s sadness, and to watch his family crumble, is to feel intimacy with a host of total strangers. But reality television has always forced us to look back at ourselves. The suicide of a child we watched become an adult, his trauma on clear display, demands the viewership ask a question of complicity: am I making this child’s life worse by witnessing all the ways his parents have let him down?
What Sister Wives viewers want – what any reality television fan wants, myself included – is the ability to watch a show predicated on family unrest or personal trauma, to judge it, and then to cast it away when it becomes too much. We want to be able to make assessments on parenting techniques and interpersonal conflict. We want to know what happened. But we also want to absolve ourselves of guilt, to leap back when our attention is weaponized. Some scattered members of the Reddit boards say they are done with the show, that they won’t tune in again, but how realistic is that for the bulk of the audience? The only action to take is to withhold attention; that’s tough to do when the stakes are at an all-time apex.
Sister Wives is scheduled for a 19th season, though it’s unclear if the mourning family is presently filming. There are still 17 children whose lives have been upended. Garrison wasn’t the only child in the Brown family who was upset about what was happening in his family – Robyn’s kids have visibly struggled despite being perceived as receiving most of their father’s favor. In a scene from season 18, Breanna cries about how she and her half-sister no longer speak despite going to the same school. “Can we cut? I don’t want to cry,” she asks production, covering her face. Garrison’s younger brother, Gabe, could also become the focal point. They were close in age, both fighting with their father about the same thing.
In season 16, Gabe wept mightily in a confessional, talking about Kody. “It’s really hard when you dedicate several months of your life to trying to reach out to someone and to just not have that reciprocated.” He tugged at his mic pack, tears running down his face, resigned and defeated. “Are we done?”
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
