VANITY FAIR: Shiny Happy People Goes Way Beyond Duggar Family Secrets

By Eve Batey

June 8, 2023

“Why didn’t I look at this in the very beginning and say, ‘this is misogyny’?” asks Cori Shepherd Stern, an executive producer of the Prime Video docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets. She’s referring to TLC reality series 19 Kids and Counting, about the day-to-day life of Arkansas’s Duggar family.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the Duggars, a primer: From 2008 to 2015, former Arkansas House of Representatives member Jim Bob Duggar and his wife, Michelle, were ubiquitous on the Discovery-owned channel as the parents of 17, 18, and eventually 19 children. As Shiny Happy People describes it, the series was a “modern-day freak show,” illustrating both the logistics of being a family the size of a hockey team and the Duggars’ evangelical Baptist beliefs—including retrograde gender roles, religion-focused home homeschooling, and unbridled reproduction.

That show was disrupted when news broke in 2015 that the Duggars’ oldest child, Josh, had allegedly molested some of his siblings over a decade before. (He never faced charges in that case, and was instead sent by his parents to a faith-based counseling program.) Advertisers fled, and the flagship series was canceled. But the family remained on TLC with a spin-off that followed the reproductive decisions of some of the Duggar progeny, including Jill Duggar Dillard—one of Josh’s alleged victims, and the only one of Jim Bob and Michelle’s kids to participate in Shiny Happy People.

The spin-off was also canceled following Josh’s 2021 arrest on child pornography charges. He’s since been convicted, and is expected to remain in federal prison until late 2032. That Shiny Happy People swiftly dispenses with Josh Duggar’s journey from allegations to conviction is the first hint that this four-episode series is about a lot more than deeply problematic reality TV. 

Directors Olivia Crist and Julia Willoughby Nason use the Duggars to dig into the arguably bigger story of a Christian organization called the Institute in Basic Life Principles. Founded by Bill Gothard in 1961, the teachings of the increasingly influential IBLP were followed by the Duggars, who then shared them with millions of TLC viewers. When Crist and Nason explained the Duggar-IBLP connection to Stern, who grew up in a Southern Baptist home, she was immediately intrigued. 

As journalist and pastor Josh Pease explains in the docuseries, “For Scientology, the gateway for most people was Tom Cruise. In a lot of ways that’s exactly what the Duggars were” for IBLP and Gothard. On the TLC series, Gothard’s teachings—described by former followers as promoting claims that girls and women have “eye traps,” characteristics that inspire uncontrollable urges in men, and advocating for parents to spank their children for hours at a time—was presented without comment, even as Gothard faced multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment. (Gothard resigned from the churchin the wake of those claims, and an internal IBLP investigation found that he had acted inappropriately, but not criminally. Gothard has denied all allegations of sexual assault and harassment, and a civil suit filed by alleged victims was voluntarily dismissed in 2018 due to statute of imitations issues. Now aged 88, he reportedly lives in the Chicago area.)

That said, Shiny Happy People “is not a takedown of TLC,” executive producer Blye Pagon Faust says. “We did a very strong outreach to numerous people who work on the different seasons of the shows, and we just didn’t have anybody who was willing to speak on the record.” It was impossible for the Shiny Happy People team to discern who knew what during production of TLC’s shows about the family.

And it’s true that many of Gothard’s wackier teachings never made it into the TLC shows on the Duggars. For example, former followers assert that Gothard claimed that Cabbage Patch Kids founder Xavier Roberts is a warlock. He reportedly encouraged members to throw out their TVs, and said men must always be clean-shaven. His expectation, as recounted by former followers in Shiny Happy People, that church members eschew pop-culture standbys like pop music, Pokémon, and Disney were soft-pedaled through TLC’s Duggar content, presented as harmless, quaint quirks as opposed to unsettling attempts at isolation and control.

By its midpoint, Shiny Happy People has moved past those matters and into IBLP’s ambitions to “permeate throughout the ecosystem,” as Stern puts it. Since its founding in 1961, she says, the tenets of IBLP have taken over the Southern Baptist church, which once counted former president Jimmy Carter as a member, with conservative politicians now pushing some of the same ideals that former followers have said were pushed by Gothard, such as requiring women to carry life-threatening pregnancies to term and opposition to medical researchinvolving stem cells. Meanwhile, as the docuseries notes, true believers and members of the IBLP-nurtured Joshua Generation—a 20-year-old conservative Christian youth movement whose members can be easily found via one wrong turn on TikTok—are gaining a national profile.

Though the streaming world has no shortage of content that presents—as Stern puts it—“a deep dive into abuse of religious structures,” it’s likely that the recent national interest in evangelical Christianity has boosted Shiny Happy People. Stern says its reception has surpassed all the team’s hopes; while a spokesperson for Amazon said the platform doesn’t release viewership numbers, as of Wednesday evening, Prime Video’s homepage declared it the US’s most popular show. Even some members of the conservative religious community are taking notice: After seeing the series, Stern says, “they are actually saying, we should sit up, we should talk about this. This is not something we should just be dismissing outright.” 

If that success is enough to get Shiny Happy People a second season, Stern and Faust say they’re brimming with ideas. An exploration of IBLP’s efforts to gain a foothold in US politics “is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Faust. They’ve already got plenty of material that didn’t fit into the initial four episodes—and people would recognize “a lot of the names associated with this movement.” Viewers would “be blown away about how influential those [IBLP supporters] actually are,” Faust says. “We'd really love to go there, if we get the opportunity.”