Sister Wives is a Train Wreck.

Photo by Duy Pham on Unsplash

Many years ago, a tv show called Sister Wives premiered on TLC. It featured a man named Kody Brown and his three wives and his then girlfriend/fiancé/soon to be fourth wife. They wanted to create a show to showcase polygamy and fundamentalist Mormonism to tell the world that not all polygamists are bad people and that it can be a functioning lifestyle. I watched the first season on tv as it aired, fascinated by these people who chose to share their husband. Of course, it ended with the marriage between Kody and his fourth wife, Robyn. After the season aired, I promptly forgot about it, mainly because we no longer had the channel to continue watching it.

I was suddenly reminded of it last year when we joined Discovery + and saw that it not only had Sister Wives but it had sixteen seasons of it! Holy moly, I didn’t realize there were that many seasons! On top of that, I started watching some commentary on YouTube about the family and found out there was a lot of juicy news about the Brown family.

If you don’t know, Robyn is the favorite wife out of all of them and as each season goes by, it becomes more and more obvious that there’d been fractures in the family all along and have become more pronounced on the season, especially with Robyn. It was announced last fall that Christine, the third wife has left Kody and moved back to Utah to be closer to her older children and grandchildren. Kody has emotionally left all his wives except for Robyn and whether or not any of the others are going to leave is up for the date.

I shouldn’t care, but I’m anxious to see where everything is going to go from here. I never really liked Kody. He always seemed a little arrogant and full of himself. In the beginning, he seemed like a genuine person who tried to give polygamy a good name. But in reality, it really isn’t. He’s no better than, say, Warren Jeffs. He might not be forcing his children into plural marriage, but he definitely doesn’t care if they like him or not once they hit their teenage years.

Sister Wives is a train wreck. What once started as promising only got worse with time. None of the sister wives like each other and Kody does nothing to promote peace and harmony within the family. The only he did right was make his children feel like siblings. Jeffs certainly didn’t do that in his cultish sect.

I keep saying I’m going to stop watching the show and watch something more wholesome. I don’t want to continue watching this. And yet, every few days I find myself watching a couple of episodes. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. TLC never has any wholesome family reality shows, there’s always a dark secret lurking in the shadows.

*Note: The women in the picture are NOT polygamists or Sister Wives. I typed in “sister wives” in the free photos search bar and this was one of the first pictures that showed up.