Jon & Kate minus love: Show on hiatus

Eager to see how the Gosselins' marital meltdown plays out on TV? You'll have to wait a while.

In a surprising development, TLC, the channel that carries Jon & Kate Plus 8, said yesterday that the popular reality show will go on hiatus until Aug. 3.

The announcement, which was released the day after divorce papers were filed (and subsequently sealed) in Montgomery County, must have pained TLC executives because the Gosselins' family saga has grown into a ratings juggernaut. The basic cable channel is averaging 980,000 viewers during prime time this year, according to Nielsen Media. Yet an unprecedented 10.6 million tuned in for Monday's episode, when the couple declared their plans to divorce after days of buildup.

Yesterday morning, fans took to the Internet in droves. They often were angry at the parents, who have been accused of exploiting the children, but supportive of the 8.

"I don't feel bad for Jon & Kate. The kids, yes. The adults, no" was a typical tweet on the microblog site Twitter.com.

Others viewed the parents as poor role models. One poster raged: "They're both weak! Finding a way to keep it together thru all the B.S. would have been worth documenting. . . . "

Most reality shows would kill for the kind of ongoing conflict unfolding in the Gosselin household (and its attendant fan obsession). In fact, it is common in the genre to foment and stage strife among its subjects.

Yet the family nature of Jon & Kate (it's all about the children, as the matriarch often reminds us) demands a more humane policy.

The channel issued a statement yesterday: "TLC continues to support the Gosselin family and will work closely with them to determine the best way to continue to tell their story as they navigate through this difficult time."

The delay was welcome news for relationship experts - although a couple of months seemed to them way too short to sort out the troubles in this family.

"When you're that public, it's tough to get those private moments to figure out what you want to do," said David Baron, chairman of the psychiatry and behavioral science department at Temple University's School of Medicine. "This artificial stress clearly created a situation that might have made things that were going bad even worse. It magnifies everything."

Of course, no one knows the true inner workings of the Gosselin family, or any family for that matter. What happens behind closed doors often is a different story from what the public perceives, especially when it comes to reality shows.

Perhaps most troubling, then, is that the children might well re-view their young lives through the lens of late-night reruns for cable eternity, a version of reality that made Mom seem bitchy and Dad like a ninth kid.

"It is something that they will carry around with them," Baron said. "If it had been Ozzie and Harriet, you'd have fond memories. This is not playing out that way. This is dysfunction."

Production is being shut down temporarily because the couple's living situation and legal status are in flux. And because the emotions stirred up by the split are still too raw to share, even for habitual fishbowl denizens like Jo-Ka.

This kind of personal misfortune wouldn't disrupt other reality shows, which finish taping months before they air. When Jenna Morasca left the All-Stars edition of Survivor in 2004, for instance, to be with her mother who was dying of cancer in Pittsburgh, the series continued without a hitch.

Jon & Kate, however, operates much closer to real time (more so than any other reality show except I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!). So it is possible for unforeseen events to suspend production.

To fill the gap, TLC will put together a nostalgic Jon & Kate retrospective for next week. After that, Cake Boss, The Little Couple, and other of the channel's series will assume Jon & Kate's Monday-night time slot during July.

The Gosselin soap opera will then resume, albeit on a modified schedule. It is unlikely that the remaining 34 originally planned episodes will be produced, but Season 5 will continue.

Beyond that, the future of the series is murky because the Gosselins' domestic plans are unresolved. On Monday's show, they indicated that for now they would take turns caring for their children, each residing in the Wernersville, Pa., home for part of the week. The filing doesn't discuss custody. At this point, both Jon and Kate remain committed to the series.

The program, as both have observed on camera, has become their career. It is also their primary source of income. So unless one or both develop other lucrative opportunities, it will be difficult to step away from their livelihood.

In a sense, the couple are trapped in their TV bubble. They have no choice but to bring their work home with them - even as they embark on separate lives.

That's the problem with reality. Sometimes, it's a little too real.