Fall TV Blog

As Jon and Kate Gosselin’s he-said-she-said heated up on Monday, a new episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8 focused on a more mundane task: cleaning out the basement of the family’s home in Wernersville, Pa.

“In a cluttered world, my mind is cluttered,” Kate said, standing off the set in her basement where she tapes her confessionals on a couch for the show. “When there is clutter, my eyes go to it and it drives me crazy. I can’t stand clutter.” The other part of the basement was her family’s “dumping ground.”

Without any sign of Jon — save for items that ended up in a box with his name on it — Kate hired a pair of professional organizers to help her accomplish her goal.

“I just wanted to get everything pulled out of boxes, organized into categories and then I wanted shelves up to display everything so that everything was up off the ground and there was floor space,” she said. They had two days to finish the task.

Kate’s best friend Jamie came in from Michigan to help with the chore. “I needed moral support and help and company,” Kate said. “I wish she could live here. We make a good team.” (more…)

TLC is shaking things up on their hit reality show by dropping Jon Gosselin from Jon & Kate Plus 8 — to be known simply as Kate Plus 8 starting Nov 2. (He’ll still be on the show occasionally, just much less.) But will anyone watch Kate’s life as a single mom?

PEOPLE.com reader Monica sounds like she will: “Good! Now he will have to get a job to support his new single lifestyle! Go Kate!” she writes.

While Patty, a Team Jon member if anything, takes a different view: “And pretty soon the viewership will be down to ZERO, and maybe these kids will finally get a chance to be kids!”

Tell us:

Michael Kovac/FilmMagic

In a stunning announcement, TLC said Tuesday morning that as of Nov. 2 Jon Gosselin would no longer appear on the popular reality series Jon & Kate Plus 8 — and the program would undergo a name change, to simply Kate Plus 8.

“Given Jon’s recent antics, there was no way the show could continue to portray him as a doting Dad, not while all this other crap was going on,” a source close to Jon Gosselin tells PEOPLE.

“Jon will still be seen on the show from time to time,” the source adds.

The series first debuted on April 16, 2007, and experienced a ratings spike once the Gosselin marriage became troubled earlier this year. This past season the couple announced they would divorce.

The fifth season premiere attracted a record 9.8 million viewers, making it the most-watched show of that evening including those on broadcast TV.

But after a six-week hiatus from new episodes, only 4.2 million viewers tuned in to see Jon & Kate on Aug. 3, and only 1.7 million reportedly watched last Monday.

Kate Gosselin recently completed a stint as a guest host of The View, sitting in for Elisabeth Hasselbeck during her maternity leave.

Gosselin has also reportedly taped a pilot for a talk show costarring Food Network star Paula Deen.

We’re just days away from October, but Monday’s Jon & Kate Plus 8 was a quick flashback to the early summertime, when Kate Gosselin took her children to the beach on Bald Head Island, N.C. In the new episode, Kate decided to a take a trip within the trip with her little girls, sextuplets Leah, Alexis and Hannah. (She’d already taken her boys to see a battleship, she explained.)

The ladies boarded a ferry off the island, waving at paparazzi on the dock, and headed into town, where a carriage drawn by a horse named Mikey picked them up and took them to the Wilmington Tea Room.

“It was nice to do fun, girly things,” Kate said as the girls dropped sugar cubes into their fruit-flavored teas. Still, she was worried about her 5-year-olds around all that fragile china. “I didn’t want to freak out and be nervous but let’s face it, I was,” she said. “There was just glass everywhere.” (more…)

Kate Gosselin spent a “long single-parent day” with her kids that began at an Amish produce farm and ended at a radiologist on Monday’s episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8.

“It feels very normal to be here by myself, to take care of the kids not with Jon but with a babysitter,” Kate, who is adjusting to life as a single mom, said during the episode, which she filmed without her soon-to-be ex-husband. “It’s starting to feel like the pity party is gone.”

The day started with a trip to “Henry’s garden,” a produce farm that Kate visited daily before moving to the family’s home in Wernersville, Pa. “He and his family are Amish. They are truly the first Amish family that I have known on a personal level,” Kate said of the owners. (more…)

On Monday’s new episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8, Kate Gosselin settled into life as a single mom.

“The new normal is I’m here a lot of the time, Jon is here some of the time and there’s no rhyme or reason to that,” she said on the show. “All I feel now is constantly, completely overwhelmed … I can’t deal with it.”

Since she and Jon Gosselin decided to divorce, the parents of eight children have been taking turns at their home in Wernersville, Pa., sharing custody of their children and appearing separately on their TLC show.

“It’s sad. I’m lonely at night being here by myself,” Kate said in a voice-over as she prepped a dinner for her kids. “This is really a true test of survival, of perseverance, of determination.”

But Kate did more than just put dinner on the table. She planned a fun-looking night of grilled chicken and an outdoor movie complete with a cinema-style popcorn maker. “I’ve got to use every minute that I’m here and I’ve got to do everything big and make memories because I only have half the time,” she said.

Grilling the chicken may have been “one of my biggest fears,” but she managed to serve up a tasty dinner without having “to rush off to the hospital with salmonella poisoning.” There was some trouble with the popcorn maker but all the kids had a snack for the movie, although not all of them stayed awake until the end. “The girls were able to walk to their beds,” she said, but the boys, whom she had to carry back inside, were a different story.

“That’s the moment when I realize I’m a single mom.” Kate said. “Typically Jon would have done that he would have done all the carrying of kids and when they’re asleep of course they weigh twice what they weigh. I had to lug Collin up to bed and he was heavy. He was cute. It was very sweet.” (more…)

In a new episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8 that aired Monday, the Gosselins went separate ways, with Kate taking her boys Aaden, Joel and Collin to a dude ranch in Wyoming while Jon stayed home with the girls, twins Mady and Cara and sextuplets Leah, Alexis and Hannah, to play games and visit the dentist.

“To be honest, I didn’t even know what Wyoming was like,” Kate said as the episode opened with their arrival at a cattle ranch. Their first stop was a chicken coop, where the boys fed a grasshopper to the chickens. “Something’s just telling me I shouldn’t do this,” she said.

“This is really not high heel country,” Bob told Kate. (more…)

Jon and Kate Gosselin continued to live separate lives on Jon & Kate Plus 8 Monday night. This time the couple, who normally spilt time with all eight kids, instead split the kids into groups.

On the episode, titled “Battleship & Barber,” Jon took 8-year-old twins Cara and Mady to a local amusement park, while Kate had a “special day” with the couple’s three sons, Collin, Aaden and Joel on a battleship near Bald Head Island, N.C., where she was vacationing. (The three youngest girls did not appear on the episode.)

Jon, who’d been overseeing the renovation of the kitchen at their home in Pennsylvania, said, “It was nice to see my girls. I hadn’t seen them in a really long time.” The newly single dad seemed pleased to hear the pitter-patter of little feet once again. “To have them come back, it was like, ‘Now I have someone to talk to,’ ” he added. “It was nice to have some company again.”

The trio went to a nearby arcade and amusement park where Mady and Cara’s different personalities really stood out. “Cara’s an outdoor girl and Mady’s an indoor girl,” said Jon. While Cara and her dad navigated an elevated rope course, Mady stayed put watching them from below.

“I’m not into climbing up and down nets and rock walls,” she said. “I don’t like being really, really, high, and that seemed really high.”

Jon, who is getting used to the fast lane in his off-camera life, enjoyed the adventure, especially driving some go-karts. “It was fun,” he said. “I wish they went faster — like super fast.”

Moving at a slower pace, Kate and the boys toured the U.S.S. North Carolina battleship, including the engine room, kitchen, sleeping quarters and ammunition room.

At one point, when navigating a particularly steep staircase, Collin told his mom he wasn’t afraid. “Mommy, boys are tough,” he said. When Kate then asked, ” ‘Are you going to take care of me some day?’ ” he, of course, answered, “yeah.”

Even as just a group of four, Kate and her boys attracted the attention of other tourists — and some paparazzi. While the kids pretended to fire the battleship’s gun, Kate jokingly encouraged them to aim at the photographers, labeled the “bad guys.”

The boys ended the episode with a trip to the barbershop followed by some ice cream. Reflecting on their day together, Kate said, “My favorite part was seeing you guys in little sailor hats. It made me cry. Yes, it did. Mommy’s cry. Yes, they do.” — Marla Lehner

Call it the case of the optimist vs. the pessimist, with Regis Philbin as Pollyanna, suggesting to Kate Gosselin on Thursday’s Live! With Regis & Kelly that one of these days her estranged husband Jon is going to come home, propose marriage again and that the two — with their eight kids — will live happily ever after.

“Now” said Philbin, “what do you think about that?”

“Wow,” responded Gosselin, who looked as though her breath had been taken away. After first joining in with the audience’s laughter, she said about her soon-to-be-ex Jon and herself: “We definitely have different goals at this point. A lot has changed. A lot of unexpected things have come up. It’s not ideal. And I can’t say you’re right at all.”

But Philbin pressed her on the subject. If Jon were to come back tomorrow, the TV host asked, and said, “Let’s put the past behind us. I want to spend the rest of my life with you and the kids … what would you say to that?”

(more…)

Claiming she continues to wear her wedding band because she wants the life adjustments for her and soon-to-be ex-husband Jon’s eight children to be gradual, Kate Gosselin’s decision even prompted debate among experts on Wednesday morning’s Today show.

But how do you feel about what Kate is doing?