“Shiny Happy People,” a new four-part docuseries streaming on Amazon Prime, tells the story of how reality television, pioneered by the channel TLC, took a far-right evangelical family from rural Arkansas that did not believe in contraception, dating, using the internet or even watching television, and deceptively molded them into America’s sweethearts.
Underneath the idyllic image of the Duggar family, as broadcast on “19 Kids and Counting” from 2008 through 2015, was a horrific secret: the oldest child, Josh, as a teenager had sexually abused girls, including his own sisters. His parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, the patriarch and matriarch of this mechanically jovial clan, concealed this damning history, even as they promoted the pre-marital chastity of their own and their adult children’s lives. As I reported in 2015, TLC sanitized the Duggars’ dedication to the fringe teachings of Bill Gothard, the disgraced founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles.
Exploitation of children — both sexual and otherwise — is endemic in Gothard’s organization and teachings.
“Shiny Happy People” follows this same narrative trajectory, and adds some new and dramatic revelations. But it is marred by the filmmakers’ failure to cite or acknowledge the many previous reports and investigations about Gothard and his organization, or to properly place the IBLP (and its homeschooling curriculum, the Advanced Training Institute) in context of the larger politics of the religious right.
There is a lot to commend in the documentary’s interviews of friends and family of the Duggars, including Jim Bob’s sister, niece and close friends. (Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, along with Gothard, declined interview requests, according to the filmmakers. In a statement, the Duggars said the series was “sad because in it we see the media and those with ill intentions hurting people we love. … This ‘documentary’ paints so much and so many in a derogatory and sensationalized…
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