Last week, the internet watched Taylor Frankie Paul throw barstools at her ex-boyfriend while another reality-star scandal received far less attention. On March 18, Arkansas police arrested Joseph Duggar on charges of child molestation. Later, they arrested his wife, Kendra, on separate child-abuse charges. One local report showed law enforcement at the gate of the Duggar family compound, a green-roofed monstrosity that defined an era of TV. There, under the all-seeing gaze of TLC, 19 Duggar siblings homeschooled, and ate tater-tot casserole, and planned the occasional prank. It didn’t end well for anyone. The family’s oldest son, Josh, has been in prison since 2022 for possessing images of child sexual abuse. In 2015, he admitted to molesting five girls — including four of his own sisters — while he lived in that famous home.

The younger Duggar now faces extradition to Florida, where he allegedly committed the crime six years ago. Paul’s fate is murkier, but whatever the outcome, she and the Duggars have something in common. In both cases, abuse became entertainment with religion the set dressing. There would be no Mormon Wives without the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. No 19 Kids and Counting without Bill Gothard, who preached against birth control and resigned from ministry after women accused him of sexual harassment and assault.

Because I know how the Duggars turned out, I am skeptical of any reality show that puts religion on display. Still, I watched Mormon Wives when it premiered, or tried to. I finished the first season and never watched another because I thought I would be complicit in something familiar and wrong. On Mormon Wives, misery saturated every scene and every outburst, and I recognized it, even though I grew up in a different church. Paul and her co-stars married, and sometimes divorced, young. They started families with men who mostly expect deference, and TikTok became an emotional outlet or a route to financial independence. On MomTok, they had some control. On TV, they had less. As advertised, the show invites us to laugh at its stars and their conservative views of gender and sex. Mormons are supposed to be prudes, but what if they’re not? What if stay-at-home moms like “soft swinging,” or intimacy outside marriage, without “going all the way?” The first season revolved, in part, around Paul and her relationship with Dakota Mortensen, who is the father of her third child. Although the series never broadcast video of her 2023 fight with Mortensen, it did air the bodycam footage of her arrest on assault charges. This February, the two argued again, which led to a domestic-violence investigation and halted filming on the show’s forthcoming season. After the video leaked, Mortensen won emergency custody of their toddler son.

There was no “soft swinging” in Duggar land that I know of, and their world was a little closer to mine, with some differences. My parents are conservative Christians, but they stopped at two children and let me wear pants. When my mother couldn’t teach us algebra, she enrolled us in school. The Duggar children had no such luck. After their father, Jim Bob, left the Arkansas state legislature, he and his wife, Michelle, managed to impress TLC with their fecundity. Their fundamentalism was a perk, I suspect. The Duggars had a lot of children, but that isn’t very interesting without the weird rules and the courtships — oh God, the courtships. Duggars did not date. They hung out, with parental permission, and married at the cusp of adulthood so they could start having babies of their own. Nobody finished college. Instead, Joseph Duggar married Kendra when he was 23 and she was 19, after they had courted for less than a year. They saved their first kiss for their televised wedding.

The Duggar empire was built on sex, or rather on an unhealthy obsession with sex. Jim Bob and Michelle enforced strict modesty rules. As sisters Jinger and Jill wrote in a 2014 book, girls needed to save their bodies for their future husbands, so they did not wear anything “low-cut, cleavage-showing, gaping or bare-shouldered,” and if they had to bend over, they tried to “cover the top” of their shirts with their hands. Each courtship stayed entirely chaste. Traditionalists found them relatable, but everyone else tuned in for the freak show. TLC built out the Duggar extended universe with large fundamentalist households in various states of implosion. The channel introduced America to the Bates family, who are friends with the Duggars, and then the Plath family, who are still on the air. Although the Duggars did not talk about sex the way Mormon Wives later would, it was just as key to their worldview and the bargain they’d struck for power. Jim Bob grew the brood with Michelle, which kept them on the air, which turned them into evangelists. While TLC made money, the Duggars campaigned for anti-abortion, anti-gay candidates like Rick Santorum. Josh Duggar took a job at the far-right Family Research Council before his abusive behavior became public.

The women of Mormon Wives seem less interested in politics and proselytization, and many describe a complex relationship with their faith. After the Paul video went viral, her co-star Jennifer Affleck said she had agreed to appear on the show because she wanted to share “the beauty and the struggles” of her life as a member of the LDS church. “I wanted to highlight marriage, being married at a very young age, the real pressures many couples face with culture and expectations,” she posted on Instagram. That may be true, but a reality show was never the right vehicle for this. Producers select for the most extreme circumstances, and when lives disintegrate on-camera, the toll is nothing more than a plotline. Certain gender norms make that outcome more likely, not less. On both shows, as in real life, the burden of hierarchy falls mostly on women. They put up with their men, birth and raise children, and struggle with what amounts to subservience. There are different ways to be Mormon, or religious in general, but that’s duller to watch.

Religion did not make Paul violent or transform the Duggar men into predators. Neither did reality TV. Each person is responsible for their own actions within a much larger context. Josh Duggar confessed his sins to his father when he was a teen, but his parents waited more than a year to seek counseling for him and his victims. Then they put him on TV along with Joseph. With a camera in the mix, people have an incentive to perform, even if they ruin themselves or someone else. ABC knew who Paul was when they cast her in The Bachelorette. I wish I could believe the cycle will end here, but I don’t think it will. There’s profit to make.

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