The most quintessential American TV show is ‘Sister Wives'

Washington Post

2 days ago

One benefit of being a columnist is that every couple of years I get to subject all of you to a close analysis of the reality show 'Sister Wives,' and it turns out today is that day.
What is 'Sister Wives?' It is a long-running TLC series about a family of fundamentalist Mormon polygamists who live in Utah, then Nevada, then Arizona and then eventually scatter as the clan breaks up. It's never-ending and dramatic and boring, and the faithful among us now just want to know whether erstwhile second wife Janelle, who moved to North Carolina, will ever open her unpronounceable flower farm (TAY-da? TIE-da? Tie-AY-da? Get it together, guys).
Those of you have never seen the show: We know, you wouldn't be caught dead tuning in to this dumpster fire, you have better things to do, etc. etc. Congratulations on your brain cells. Now please leave us in peace to discuss a show, which wraps up its 19th season on Sunday, that has over the years become one of my lodestars for interpreting relationships and America.
As a quick refresher: This show first aired in 2010, piggybacking off the popularity of 'Big Love,' an HBO drama about a fictional modern polygamous family, which starred Bill Paxton and which explored what it looked like to live a 19th century religion in a 21st century reality. 'Sister Wives' was that but less premium-cable. It introduced the country to Joseph Smith birthday celebrations, bulk meal prep (18 children!!) and the Utah accent, which pronounces 'real' and 'deal' as 'rill' and 'dill.'
As a quicker refresher: The Brown family now hates each other. Kody Brown started off with four wives but now has just one as Christine, Janelle and Meri all spent the previous three seasons lining up to divorce him. The sad patriarch lives in Flagstaff with his single remaining spouse, Robyn, who began the series run as the hot new girlfriend but who now looks so perpetually low-energy that one podcaster I follow speculates that the couple's favorite spicy role-playing game involves pretending to be in hospice.
The bulk of this most recent season was spent figuring out what to do about Coyote Pass, the overpriced land on which the family once intended to build a compound before everything went to hell. So now Christine has remarried, Meri is running a B&B back in Utah, Janelle has moved eastward with her grandbabies and her farm dreams, but all of them keep having to trudge back to Flagstaff to bicker with one another about who owes what to whom. As you might imagine, these are not really conversations about money.
Why couldn't Kody just admit that he once he met Robyn, he started ignoring his other wives? Why couldn't Meri admit that her mid-series catfishing incident was an emotional affair? Did the family ever really function or was it just held together by a sticky paste of tuna casseroles and scripture? Here is Kody, once an earnest and good-natured lunkhead, gradually getting redpilled by the manosphere. And here is Meri, whose self-improvement journey dumped her at the alter of Brené Brown and Mel Robbins (this woman is always doing the work). And here is Christine, an irritating Disney Adult cheerfully rolling with her gay daughter's wedding, and here is Janelle, donating to the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. At one point all the wives are involved in multilevel marketing schemes; at one point everyone's trying therapy.
I'm telling you, the answer to every political pollster's question of the Trump era — how will the residents of flyover states deal with covid, with vaccines, with transgender issues, with health insurance, with poor retirement savings — is explored in one 'Sister Wives' episode or another. It's got every possible archetype. It's the most American show.
There are podcasters who make their entire livings analyzing 'Sister Wives.' There is an honest-to-God communications professor who uses 'Sister Wives' as a weekly opportunity to teach his listeners about communication theory. Tourists travel to Flagstaff and take pictures of themselves at Salsa Brava or Fat Olives, restaurants that appear on the show, and, to be clear, all of these people are much crazier than I am.
The biggest question of all at this point is: Why are any of us still here? 'Sister Wives' was marketed as an exploration of how one man could manage four wives, and the ultimate answer is, he couldn't. The original premise no longer exists. We're at the 'Tell All' point of the season now, a multi-part saga in which cast members sit down and dissect whatever we all saw on camera this season. The host, Sukanya Krishnan, does her best, but Robyn compares the experience to a root canal. Reading between the lines, the only reason any of them are here is because the show is now their main source of income. Kody and Robyn are constantly adding to their collection of horse-themed jewelry and art, and to earn their paychecks, the job description is self-reflection.
And through that reflection, viewers get a master class on the mechanics of reality television. These five adults managed to put on a happy facade for a really long time. But since the cameras kept rolling, eventually the facade melted. Turns out they spent a lot of the early seasons lying to us and to themselves. Meri and Janelle didn't just have a complicated relationship, they could barely stand to be in the same room as one another. Christine wasn't just going through a rough patch with Kody, she was actively fantasizing about leaving for years.
Midway through the season, a tragedy struck, which is so unspeakable that I worry how to even bring it up in this snarky column: One of Kody and Janelle's sons dies by suicide. Garrison had struggled with alcohol for a long time, we are told — something else we didn't see on screen — which had been brought on by the isolation of covid. And viewers, who are human, couldn't help but wonder about the other contributing factors. Was his fractured family to blame? Were we, the audience members who kept tuning in to watch the injuries?
I couldn't imagine the show would continue after that event, and yet, there we were the next Sunday, watching grief-stricken parents trying to make sense of the most horrible event that could ever befall a parent and doing it while wearing microphones. We were told that Garrison loved cats. That a good way to honor his memory would be a donation to the Humane Society. I made a donation and wondered if it was time to permanently say goodbye to the Brown family.
As for why I, and so many others, hung in for so long — my personal answer is that I wanted to see if they could put it all back together.
I'm not asking whether they can all get married again, because they won't. Rather, I'm wondering what it looks like when everything has burned to the ground, but the cameras keep showing up, so you do too, trying to figure out this mess of your life and how it got this way. In the most recent episode, Krishnan kept prodding Janelle on whether she could be friends with Kody and Robyn again. After politely demurring several times, Janelle finally came out with it. 'I just don't like them,' she said.
It was weird, frankly, for Krishnan to press the issue. Janelle left Kody, so why should she be expected to pal around with him and his remaining wife? But I got why Krishnan wouldn't let it go. Because this is the most American show on television. Because we all have to understand our past before we map the future. Because these are people who once vowed to spend their whole lives in a united state, and even if they sell Coyote Pass, they're still going to be bound by joy, grief, struggle, memories.
Because every one of us living out this broken current reality of America is also trying to figure out whether an RFK Jr. supporter can sit down with a manosphere resident and a chipper Disney princess and an MLM high-seller and try to remember what we have in common. Try to envision what it could look like if we could ever put it back together. Try to remember that a family is still a family and a country is still a country no matter how much you hate each other, so you just have to grit your teeth and try again next season.