We’re sure it wasn’t much of a shocker when Jon and Kate Gosselin, the duo who lent their name to the insipid Jon and Kate Plus Eight, announced their separation and impending divorce. Let’s face it, Kate is a complete shrew and Jon is an emasculated tool, so it was only a matter of time. We’re just lucky they never went fully over the edge giving us Wards of the State Plus Eight. Today the channel that the Gosselins call their home, TLC, announced that the show would continue on without Jon Gosselin. We don’t know if there is strife between the network and Jon, or if he’s just too busy getting laid by someone who’s not a total bitch with a vagina that doubles as a clown car, but in all honesty, we feel Jon is better off.
The sad fact about reality television is that the ideas behind the show start to get stale. After a while, even ratcheting up the scripted drama isn’t enough for viewers, and your reality stars start doing things besides picking a mate, like trying out different jobs or taking a bus full of prostitutes around the country to see who can embarrass their parents the most. TLC has chosen to rename the Gosselin’s show Kate Plus Eight, but we are afraid that it might not be enough to keep people tuning in to the network so they can sell Swiffers and bombard you with Cash 4 Gold ads. What follows are some ideas that we here at Re:Generator are offering to TLC, free of charge, so that they can keep the Gosselins in diapers and fruit snacks.
Kate Plus Weight
The specter of obesity looms large in America. An even greater threat is childhood obesity. It seems our poor nation doesn’t have a chance at being healthy, what with the cornucopia of unhealthy but easy to cook foods on the market, and a plethora of fast food establishments to give mom one more hour a night in which she can zone out and watch other people live their lives on television. Knowing how hard it is to raise eight children on her own, it would be a smart move for Kate to secure a lucrative Pizza Hut sponsorship and start filling the kids up with processed foods as quickly as she can. Once the children reach that frightening point where their weight is affecting their health, the show can switch gears to a Celebrity Fit Camp or The Biggest Loser style weight loss competition where the winner gets to go to college and the loser gets put on anti-cholesterol medication.
Kate Plus ‘Bait
Going through a divorce is a traumatic experience. Even the most level-headed person can find themselves making the kind of ill-advised decisions they would normally condemn other people for. As Jon and Kate Plus Eight made all too clear, Kate isn’t level-headed to begin with. Partly to spite Jon, and partly because she really needs a babysitter, any babysitter, Kate will start dating a 14-year-old boy whose name will ultimately be bleeped out for legal reasons. Kate will insist her children refer to her jailbait paramour as “Daddy” – and it will only become creepier from there. Audiences should expect a flesh-crawling season full of statutory rape, twisted power dynamics, and excerpted readings of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita for the precocious teen’s AP world literature class. While TLC will feel an ethical obligation to suspend the show until she can get her act together, they will in fact wait until the episodes air to see if their cash cow is still viable.
Kate Plus Freight
It’s no secret that America just loves shows about people at work. Especially if your job has a high rate of injury. What started with COPS is now a veritable cottage industry based around men who either cut down trees, catch seafood, or drive trucks. After putting in overtime at your job in order to pay the 30% interest on your mortgage, it seems nothing relaxes you like watching other people slave away at their job. It would be a simple thing for them to combine the riveting drama of raising children with the excitement of Ice Road Truckers. Kate and the kids would load up in a specially modified big rig and take the to Canadian wilderness, delivering pipes and chemicals to the locations near or above the Arctic Circle. Kate will navigate the twisting, dangerous roads in between diaper changes and telling the kids not to make her “come back there” or “call their father”. When Kate’s oversized semi gets stuck out on the ice, hijinxs ensue.
Kate Plus Hate
Nothing boosts reality show ratings like manufactured drama, and few things are more dramatic than racial conflict. With the network desperate to show Kate in a positive light, Kate will be sent to the Deep South, where her biracial brood will make people who insist they aren’t racist feel something awfully close to racism. Confounded by the ever-present cameras, these agents of hate will call Kate a Nazi communist who wants to take away their guns so she can kill their grandmothers with them. When Kate has her neighbors over to try to clear up their apparent confusion over her family, a sad, middle-aged man will scream “you lie!” whenever she insists she’s just like everyone else. As the season progresses, her neighbors will grow increasingly violent and irrational, until the KP8 family have no choice but to get the hell out of Dodge.
Kate Plus Crepes
Who doesn’t love shows about cooking? Especially if the chef on the show is a complete dick who spends more time yelling at people than cooking, or challenges people just trying to scrape out a living to a contest where he shows them how much better he is at cooking their specialty? Americans also love shows where people who are down on their luck get their home/bodies/clothes/lives renovated. The pinnacle of these type of shows is when a chef comes along and renovates a restaurant and improves the owners lives by teaching them the importance of food safety and cooking edible food. It would be a natural fit to have Kate and company open their own themed restaurant serving the oft-overlooked but completely delicious crepe. You even have an entire kitchen staff and front of house ready to roll, once they can tie their own shoes and snap their own pants. The drama of owning a struggling restaurant set against the excitement of avoiding lawsuits over child labor and health code violation can unfold each week until, when on the brink of chapter 11, Gordon Ramasy swoops in like a swashbuckling hero and coverts the restaurant into a cheap Dave and Buster’s knock off.
