Just eight months after canceling "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" after Mama June Shannon reconnected with a convicted sex offender, TLC faces a strikingly similar controversy over its top-rated show, "19 Kids & Counting," with the admission of child molestation by the Duggar family's oldest son, Josh.
Is the network just unlucky, or did its executives (and show producers) fall down on the job?
For TLC, a division of Discovery Communications, the stakes are high. In the last week since 27-year-old Josh Duggar admitted to acting "inexcusably" as a young teenager, at least four national advertisers have pulled out of the show, including Walgreens on Tuesday.
The show, which consistently drew a weekly audience of 3 million and as much as 4.5 million for this February's episode featuring Jill Duggar's and Derek Dillard's wedding, has been yanked from the cable channel's schedule though not officially cancelled.
And in the wake of the revelations, it's become clear that there was a problem in the vetting process for both "Honey Boo Boo" and the Duggar show, which began as a one-off special on Discovery Health.
"When TLC absorbed the show, they had a family that had only been screened for an hour-long documentary and took them to series," a prominent reality executive speaking on the condition of anonymity told TheWrap. "It would've been much different had they ordered numerous episodes at the start."