Any casual peruser of American cable television is probably familiar with the Duggar family – if not with the specifics of their juggernaut series on TLC, then with the sheer number of them. From 2007 until 2015, the Duggars, a highly conservative Christian baptist family from Arkansas, starred on a reality TV series titled after their ever-expanding number of children – first 17, then 18, then 19 Kids and Counting. They were the celebrity inverse to the many K-named Kardashians, whose show bottled American capitalism, hustle culture and shamelessness. All 19 of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s children, born between 1998 and 2009, had names beginning with the letter J. The girls all wore Pilgrim-esque dresses and kept their hair long and curly. All were educated at home through faith materials, and all marketed, consciously or not, a vision of benign, rural, wholesome religious conservatism.
This is the jumping off point for Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, a new Amazon Prime series about the family and the larger fundamentalist group their show represented and sanitized. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a show about a family of 21 living in perfect harmony while disavowing the secular world and teaching women polite subservience was not quite as easy as it seemed, nor the harmless curiosity that viewers seemed to think it was.
