‘Shiny Happy People’ Has Worn Out its Welcome
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(OPINION) On April 21, 1986, Geraldo Rivera hosted a two-hour television program. “The Secrets of Al Capone’s Vault” would open, on live television, a walled-off underground room once owned by the murderous gangster and thief.
The program was hyped relentlessly in the weeks leading up to the event. Al Capone’s sordid history was rehearsed on legitimate news channels. On the night of the live event, more than 30 million people tuned in. It remains the most-watched syndicated television program in history.
It also turned out to be one of the biggest journalistic busts. There was nothing in the vault but a lot of dust and a couple of empty bottles. After Rivera signed off, he told reporters covering the television extravaganza, “I guess we struck out.” He later said he went back to his hotel and got drunk, passed out, and slept for 16 hours. Rolling Stone Magazine called the program one of the “50 Worst Decisions in TV History.”
But Rolling Stone’s list came out before the latest season of the Amazon Prime documentary “Shiny Happy People,” subtitled “A Teenage Holy War.”
Back in 2023, I wrote that I was “both frustrated and mesmerized” by the first season of this docuseries. “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets” was a behind-the-scenes story of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their children, the stars of the TLC hit television series “19 and Counting” and a number of spin-offs.
Now, I’m just frustrated. The problems with the Duggar episodes were many, and they are amplified in the second season, a supposed exposé of the Christian ministry Teen Mania, a ministry active in the 1990s and 2000s that attracted more than a million teenagers and young adults to its Acquire the Fire events.
Both seasons of “Shiny Happy People” have – either knowingly or not – used Geraldo Rivera as their model. Like Rivera, they chose stories from a past distant enough that it didn’t have to do any real journalism. This story had already been well reported by others. In fact, that’s my first grievance with “Shiny Happy People.” Far from providing new information, both seasons of “Shiny Happy People” mostly ignore the substantive reporting done by others more than a decade ago, including WORLD and Christianity Today.
Excellent reporting by J.C. Derrick for WORLD was cited in the final 20 minutes of the final episode of “A Teenage Holy War,” but most of the three episodes relies on earnest interviews with people who claim to have been harmed by Teen Mania.
It’s journalism for the post-modern era: Not the truth, but my truth.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not defending Teen Mania. Indeed, I devoted a page to the problems at Teen Mania in my 2009 book “A Lover’s Quarrel With The Evangelical Church.” When I revised the book last year, I expanded that section to include J.C. Derrick’s fine reporting.
But the producers of “Shiny Happy People” missed an opportunity to add value to the reporters who proceeded them. If they aspire to be anything more than tabloid fodder, and its producers and directors anything more than conflict entrepreneurs, they have failed spectacularly.
To be specific in my grievances: First, both seasons of “Shiny Happy People” either ignored or edited out reasonable voices that could have added much insight and nuance to this story. “Shiny Happy People” tried to sell the tale that Ron Luce and Teen Mania were brought down by a blogger who posted the anonymous stories of people harmed by the ministry. That’s pure fabulism. The Recovering Alumni blog featured in “Shiny Happy People” had been operating for five years to almost no effect when WORLD magazine decided to investigate.
Financial problems brought down Teen Mania, financial problems first reported by J.C. Derrick and WORLD in 2013 and 2014. (Though, full disclosure, WORLD spoke positively about Teen Mania in an article on “The Joshua Generation” in 1999). Derrick confirmed to me that the producers of “Shiny Happy People” did not attempt to interview him for the series.
A second problem with the new season is also one we also saw in the first season, which is an attempt to impute guilt by the most tenuous of associations. The first season tried to suggest that the Duggars and Bill Gothard were at the center of a vast network of organizations that included TeenPact, Patrick Henry College, the Family Research Council, Generation Joshua and the Home School Legal Defense Association and others. The documentary did not include interviews or statements from any of these organizations.
In “A Teenage Holy War,” the behind-the-scenes villain is The Arlington Group. The Arlington Group was a coalition of conservative groups that held regular conference calls and occasional meetings to discuss issues of common interest, and — in some cases — to coordinate action. Members included Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, Salem Communications, and the National Association of Evangelicals.
In the early 2000s, I participated in a couple of the group’s conference calls, and I can tell you that it was not the nefarious, shadowy puppet master “Shiny Happy People” wants you to believe. I found the group to be mildly helpful in keeping me abreast of what was going on in the conservative Christian movement, and even less helpful in mobilizing the member groups to action. It was one of dozens, if not hundreds, of informal groups — on both the left and the right — that meet weekly in Washington. The Arlington Group has since disbanded.
A third problem with Season Two is a breach of basic journalism standards: None of the people and organizations criticized in “Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War” were given a voice in this documentary. Not Ron Luce himself, nor any of the hundreds of thousands of people who benefited from Teen Mania’s programs, nor any members of The Arlington Group. No one who might have offered a balanced or nuanced understanding of either Teen Mania or the state of evangelicalism in the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s. Neither were any of the journalists (including J.C. Derrick, Christianity Today’s Morgan Lee or myself) asked to provide nuance or perspective.
In fact, most of the “talking heads” in the documentary (including Jeff Sharlet, Sarah McCammon and Josh Harris) are already well-known for their grievances with evangelicalism. If the producers had chosen interviewees with greater objectivity and fewer tears, their documentary would have been far more convincing.
Let me repeat, in closing, that I am not defending Ron Luce or Teen Mania. My own critique has been on-the-record for 15 years. I was on the editorial team at WORLD when J.C. Derrick published his impactful stories in 2014 and 2015. I’m glad Teen Mania is gone.
But sensational, grievance-driven work such as “Shiny Happy People” is just as bad. In fact, it’s the other side of the same coin. Teen Mania grew by painting clear pictures of heroes and villains, by glossing over nuance, by providing a clear vision of what they believed was right and wrong. The producers of “Shiny Happy People” are doing the same thing, equally convinced of the rightness of their cause.
I have not seen numbers, but it appears to me that “Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War” is not getting the same “buzz” the first season did. I take that to be a good sign. Perhaps people are growing weary of this brand of rear-view mirror gazing conflict entrepreneurship.
Then again, maybe not. Amy Duggar recently told TV Insider: “I don’t think ‘Shiny Happy People’ is slowing down anytime soon. I think it’s picking up momentum, and more people are finding out about it.”
If Geraldo Rivera’s Al Capone debacle is any indication, she may be right. What should have been the end of Rivera’s career ended up being a re-boot. In his 1991 autobiography “Exposing Myself,” he wrote, “My career was not over, I knew, but had just begun. And all because of a silly, high-concept stunt that failed to deliver on its titillating promise.”
The makers of “Shiny Happy People” have learned Geraldo Rivera’s lesson well.
This piece was originally published at MinistryWatch.
Warren Cole Smith previously served as Vice President of WORLD News Group, publisher of WORLD Magazine, and Vice President of The Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He has more than 30 years of experience as a writer, editor, marketing professional, and entrepreneur. Before launching a career in Christian journalism 25 years ago, Smith spent more than seven years as the Marketing Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers.