Did Jill Duggar Just Reveal Possible New Storyline For Duggar Family’s Reality Show?
Jill Duggar Dillard just did something that might give fans of the Duggar family hope that the controversial clan’s TLC reality series, Jill & Jessa: Counting On, will return for a second season.
As the Hollywood Gossip reports, fans of the Duggar family have launched a desperate social media campaign to get Jill Duggar and her siblings back on TV. They’ve started spreading the hashtag “#BringtheDuggarsBack” on various social media platforms, but it hasn’t really caught on. To make matters worse for hardcore fans, this lack of viewer interest in asking TLC to bring Jill & Jessa: Counting On back isn’t the only hurdle the Duggar family has to overcome to get back on TV. As the Inquisitr previously reported, their show suffered from declining ratings, a loss of advertisers, and a lack of new material. Without any new courtships or pregnancies to focus on, TLC struggled to film enough new footage to fill each hour-long episode, and fans complained that the network was using too many flashbacks and recaps as filler.
However, Jill Duggar just dreamed up a potential Jill & Jessa: Counting On storyline that TLC might use for a future episode of the show. On Wednesday, Jill tweeted that she was trying to track down the birth mother of her mother-in-law, Cathy Dillard Byrum. Derick Dillard’s mother was adopted, which is something that was mentioned during the Jill & Jessa: Counting On season finale.
According to Jill Duggar, she started searching for Cathy’s biological mother because she wanted her and Derick’s son, Israel, to meet his great-grandmother.
Because Jill Duggar knew so many details about Cathy’s birth mother, it was easy for her followers to find out that TLC won’t get to film this meeting; a search on the Find A Grave website revealed that Cathy Dillard’s biological mom died in 1992.
TLC is already in the business of researching celebrities’ family trees on the genealogy docu-series Who Do You Think You Are? so a quest to find Cathy Dillard’s roots and any living biological family members would be right up the network’s alley. It would also tie in nicely with all the adoption talk that went on during the last episode of Jill & Jessa: Counting On. As People reports, both Jill and her sister Jessa revealed that they were interested in adopting children. However, Jill’s husband said that her next baby will likely be a biological one.
“I feel like we will have another child,” Derick Dillard told the TLC cameras. “I just don’t know how. It will probably be a naturalized citizen of the family.”
As Us Weekly reports, the Zika virus has some fans concerned about Jill getting pregnant while she and Derick are in Central America living as missionaries. The mosquito-borne disease can cause severe birth defects in babies, and it’s such a problem there that the El Salvador government has warned women not to get pregnant until 2018. Jill and Derick don’t believe in using birth control, so there’s a good chance that they will welcome another baby before then. However, they have not revealed how long they plan on staying in the mission field, so they may return to Arkansas before Jill Duggar gets pregnant with her second child. If Jill and Derick planning on helping Cathy Dillard track down her bio family with a camera crew in tow, they’ll obviously have to return to the States to do so.
Some critics of the Duggar family don’t agree with Jill Duggar’s decision to ask the public for help finding Cathy’s bio mom.
“Why is Jill speaking for Cathy (Derick’s mom)? Cathy hasn’t posted anything about finding her birth mother so why is Jill taking this into her own hands?” a post on the Duggar Family News Facebook page reads. “Why is she using her baby to illicit sympathy and attention? Sorry Jill, but Izzy couldn’t give a darn who he meets at his age.”
Do you think Jill Duggar’s tweet was inappropriate? And is it possible that she’s using the search for Cathy’s bio family members as a Jill & Jessa: Counting On storyline?
[Image via TLC/YouTube]
