HALLOWEEN

Quints by Surprise

Season 3 (2011)

I’ve already written about my fondness for Jon & Kate Plus 8 (most of it, anyway) but I’ve always asserted the appeal lay not in the kids but in the personalities of the parents.  That theory has certainly been proven true now that I’ve watched Quints by Surprise, TLC’s tame replacement for the delicious Gosselin train wreck. 

And boy was TLC playing it safe when they cast this show!  After the Jon and Kate implosion they went in the extreme opposite direction, trading bitchery for extreme niceness.  The Bland McBlandersons are the most boring family on television.  Think of the moderately good-looking couple in high school that hung with the popular kids but had zero personalities except for the fact they dated each other steadily and seemed destined for marriage.  Well, they got married, moved to Austin and had quintuplets (plus one other kid).  The end.

Generic Blonde Wife and her slightly Cavemanish Generic Husband spend this episode half-heartedly decorating for Halloween, going to a pumpkin patch and dressing their kids as the characters from The Wizard of Oz before taking them trick-or-treating.  Everything they do in this episode is Halloween-related but everything they do is also mind-numbingly boring so who cares?  Seriously, the most exciting thing that happens in this episode is when one of the quints falls down and bleeds but then is fine.  Ho hum.  I’m not saying I wanted the kid to be permanently injured but I wanted SOMETHING interesting to happen.

Even I am not immune to this level of adorableness

One of the little girls is obsessed with scarecrows, which I thought was a cute little kid thing to be obsessed with.  I was temporarily impressed that the parents were at least going to let two of the girls go as Glinda (one was “Good Witch” and one was “Good Witch Princess”) rather than make them each fulfill a different role but then sure enough the mom brainwashed one of the two Glindas by suggest-ordering her with “You want to be the bad witch, right?”  So much for that brief moment of non-conformity.   

Halloween Quotient: It honestly probably deserves a 3 based on how Halloween-centric it is but I was so bored I’m giving it a 2.

See It, Skip It, Own It?

Skip it and go watch a Jon & Kate Plus 8 Halloween episode (or any episode) instead.