JON & Kate Gosselin — and even “Octomom” Nadya Su leman — get the “Law & Order” treatment in an upcoming episode tweaking reality TV stars.
In “Reality Bites,” airing Oct. 16, both the Gosselins and Suleman are mentioned by name in a plot revolving around a reality show eerily similar to TLC’s “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” which has turned the bickering, divorcing Gosselins into tabloid fodder. (The show’s since been renamed “Kate Plus Eight.”)
The show here is called “Larry Plus 10” and chronicles the struggles of a single dad, Larry Johnson (Jim Gaffigan), who’s raising 10 adopted special needs kids by himself — after his wife, Joy, is bludgeoned-to-death.
Detectives Lupo and Bernard (Jeremy Sisto, Anthony Anderson) grow suspicious when it’s revealed that Joy Johnson wasn’t totally on board with doing the show — she feared for her kids’ privacy — and that Larry, a real estate developer deeply in debt, signed the lucrative “Larry Plus 10” contract the day after his wife’s murder.
Thrown into the mix is the philandering Larry’s girlfriend — the young babysitter, no less — and Belinda Alvarez (Nina Lisandrello), a sassy Nadya Suleman lookalike who also has 10 kids (by in-vitro fertilization) and was competing with the Johnsons to get the show.
“I was hoping for Octuplets but God decided to bestow that blessing on Nadya Suleman,” Alvarez tells the detectives.
She says she wanted her show to be “like ‘Jon & Kate,’ you know, only less depressing” — and was furious after losing out to the Johnsons.
There are several scenes of cameras shooting Larry and his children in their house, and even a scene in which Larry’s sister, who’s flown in to help out, gives a typical “confessional” interview to the camera (holding one of the kids, of course).
There’s also the seedy “Larry Plus 10” producer, Artie (Michael Showalter) who, in a stroke of reality show genius, decides to move the Johnson and Alvarez families into a Long Island mansion to live with the “human lie detector” — in order to determine who’s telling the truth about the murder (shades of another reality show, Fox’s “Moment of Truth“).