Here Comes Honey Boo Boo has been officially cancelled by TLC, the network confirms, after disturbing reports that star Mama June is in a relationship with a convicted child molester.
“TLC has cancelled the series Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and ended all activities around the series, effective immediately,” a network spokesman said. “Supporting the health and welfare of these remarkable children is our only priority. TLC is faithfully committed to the children’s ongoing comfort and well-being.”
On Thursday, TMZ reported that Mama June — mother to nine-year-old Alana Thompson, the inspiration for the series — is dating Mark McDaniel, a Georgia man convicted of aggravated child molestation (reportedly against one of June’s relatives) who spent 10 years in prison. He was released in March, about six months after Mama June split with her long-time partner Sugar Bear. TMZ posted pictures of Mama June and McDaniel together in a hotel room.
Mama June took to Facebook and denied that she was seeing McDaniel, saying they broke up a decade ago. She wrote: “It isnt true i promise my kids r #1 priority over anything else and I would never put them in danger period over this or anything else they r my life this is my past I left him 10 yrs ago for it and I wouldn’t go back.”
On Friday morning, she posted a Facebook video again denying the story: “The statement of me dating a sex offender is totally untrue. I would not ever ever ever put my kids in danger, I love my kids too much. That is my past. I have not seen that person in 10 years and don’t seem to want to see that person,” she said.
Her daughter Pumpkin told Radar Online her mother “left Mark 10 years ago.”
Photoshopped images
McDaniel’s son Michael echoed the same thing to E! News, adding that he believes the molestation charges were false and the hotel room pictures were photoshopped.
This is a very abrupt end to what’s been a controversial — and highly rated — TV series for TLC since 2008, chronicling the low-income family as they became stars. TMZ reported that the network has already shot all of the episodes for the upcoming fifth season and will have to shelve them.
The series was a spin-off from Toddlers & Tiaras after young Alana (‘Honey Boo Boo’) was so charismatic on camera that the network decided to build a whole show around her and her quirky mother and siblings from Georgia. Alana’s many lines were instantly quotable — and often subtitled — while Mama June became famous for her extreme couponing and low-cost recipes for things such as “sketti”.
In a story before the show’s second season, The Washington Post’s TV critic Hank Stuever wrote about a fascination with the family that horrified so many:
“Even if it were entirely scripted, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo feels as real to me as the Great Depression images shot by the WPA photographers. Okie refugees of the 1930s appear so stoic in sepia photographs because we can’t hear them fight about a spilled jar of puffed cheese balls. Hard as this might be for Honey Boo Boo’s detractors to stomach, I think the show is a fitting document for our times, good or bad.”
Star of the show
He also said that while Alana may have started as the star of the show, Mama June stole the spotlight:
“Anyhow, it’s not really Alana’s show anymore. The real find was June Shannon, Alana’s 33-year-old mother. Although she has been mocked far and wide, there is pleasure in encountering someone so comfortable being herself. At its heart, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is a show about a family that enjoys being with one another.”
At the end of the day, he wrote, the show is really about family over everything else:
“The more we hang around the Boo Boo clan, the less they seem like ogres and the more they serve as a fascinating entree into America’s most pressing concerns: economy, employment, equality, health, community. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’s producers have a keen eye for the class indicators that smart observers love to deconstruct. The camera is continually glancing at anything it considers a cultural cue — passing trains, litter, rust, copulating animals, a chicken perched on a pile of laundry, a shack selling ‘peches.’ The show lives for opportunities to follow June and her brood deeper into redneck-land [a go-kart track, a pro-am wrestling match], but finds its best material in the warm, sectional-sofa centre of home.”
In her Facebook video on Friday, Mama June urged that although TLC told them to stay quiet over the last several months, this is not the last you’ve seen of the family. She promised to update the many fans of the show all about their lives.
“This experience has been awesome to us, the girls have been able to do things they would not normally get to do,” she said of her four daughters. “And we just want to thank y’all from the bottom of our heart.”
