Amazon Prime

“Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets” comes out today on Amazon Prime.

A chaser to “19 Kids and Counting,” this four-part documentary examines the strict, hyper-religious scaffolding the Duggars and families like them pull around themselves, and what happens when that scaffolding fails to keep bad things at bay. The Duggar clan’s star fell in recent years after revelations that brother Josh Duggar molested his sisters. Josh Duggar is currently in prison after being convicted on child pornography charges.

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The Washington Post already gave the Duggars of Springdale some ink earlier this week in a story about Christian home-schoolers deciding that public schools aren’t so sinful after all.

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Today, zingy Washington Post style columnist Monica Hesse makes a phenomenal case for why you should hole up and waste your weekend watching the Duggars’ dark secrets unfold.

After watching all four parts of the series, here’s a tiny little nugget I can’t stop thinking about: In the culture of IBLP — a uniquely American spin on Christianity where the logo is a bald eagle landing on a Bible — boys in families are discouraged from changing their baby sisters’ diapers.

Baby genitalia is too titillating, apparently? Gross. Here’s her delicious write-up.

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Arkansas Times contributor Guy Lancaster will stream the whole shebang this weekend and offer his thoughts, muddled as they might be by the bourbon he plans to swill as he watches. Y’all dive in too and we can compare notes.

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