Is the Duggar family being ghosted by TLC?
Fans are wondering if Counting On has been cancelled after there’s been zero official word of the series being renewed for a seventh season.
It turns out that viewers aren’t the only ones in the dark — the Duggars don’t seem to have any idea, either.
Season six of Counting On ended in October.
We’ve had no word of renewal. We’ve also had no word of cancellation.
Possible reasons for the series being renewed is that the show has a very devoted fanbase.
Not all of them are fans of the Duggars themselves, but they’re captivated by the fundamentalist lifestyle that the family lives and the drama within the massive family and its strict rules.
There’s also almost a guarantee of drama to come.
Joy-Anna Duggar and Austin Forsyth got married earlier this year, but not quite so quickly that fans haven’t noticed Joy-Anna’s conspicuously huge baby bump.
Many believe that the Forsyth wedding was a shotgun wedding, and that Joy-Anna broke her family’s medieval courtship rules and that the family rushed her to the altar and is lying to the world to save face.
This would not be the first time. Remember, this is the same family that hid from the world that Josh Duggar had molested 5 young girls, including four of his own sisters.
So, yeah, covering up a “scandalous” premarital pregnancy wouldn’t exactly be a stretch.
With all of that drama and more to come, would TLC really cancel the Duggars?
Maybe.
Counting On has never done as well with ratings as 19 Kids and Counting did.
Some former viewers may have lost interest in the Duggars, or simply been frightened off by their fringe lifestyle and the reality that 19 different children had to grow up that way, and never had a chance at a normal life.
But we think that what really hurt ratings and continues to haunt the family is, again, the Josh Duggar sex abuse scandal.
And it’s not like Josh is the only source of controversy within the family.
Recently, Derick Dillard was fired from Counting On after engaging in repeated bigoted messages about trans teen Jazz Jennings, a fellow TLC star who has her own show on the network.
In general, it’s bad form to criticize a show on your own network or a star on it unless they’ve done something atrocious. That kind of badmouthing doesn’t help anybody’s ratings and will upset higher ups at the network.
In Derick Dillard’s case, though, he was insulting Jazz Jennings, misgendering her at every opportunity and bashing her existence as a young trans woman and the show itself.
TLC had enough, and fired him for it. But with the husband of one of the main stars of Counting On now banned from the series, how do they go on?
If you think that the Duggars know … think again.
This week, on the Duggar family blog, the Duggars shared their total lack of news about the fate of their series:
“Counting On has been off the air for six weeks now, and we know you all are eager to hear whether the Duggars will be returning for a new season.”
Yep.
“We have been in contact with TLC, but at this time, there are no announcements to share.”
In contact but not told anything? We’ll discuss what that means.
“As soon as there is news to give, we will post it here.”
We’re sure that they will.
“In the meantime, we’re curious to hear what you like most about the show and what other TV programs you watch, if any?”
The Duggars, famously, eschew mainstream television. We don’t think that your recs of Stranger Things or The Good Place or whatever are what they’re looking for.
They say that they’ve “been in contact” with TLC, but still know nothing.
Which sounds like, at the very least, whichever producers they’re talking to don’t know the fate of the series.
Maybe TLC is trying to figure out if they can court a new sponsor or two or figure out a new timeslot for the show that will mesh well with their other programming.
Or maybe TLC is just biding their time until the right time — when they have big news to share, or during a holiday when everyone’s distracted — to announce that Counting On will not be getting a seventh season.
We don’t know. It’s odd to hear that the Duggars are as in the dark as the rest of us.
