Screen: TLC
Breaking The Faith Blows Open The Community Of Warren Jeffs's FLDS Followers
Probably not wide open; it's TLC. But it's something.
I know that TLC mostly makes exploitative claptrap. I know that one of its longest-running series glorifies a family that, for religious reasons, has an irresponsible number of children and also perms. I also know that the last time they tried to get inside a secretive faith-based community, with Breaking Amish, the consensus was that some or all of it was either kind of or very fake.
And in spite of all this, I am all over this week's premiere of Breaking The Faith.
The titular "faith" in question is Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS for short) — the very small minority of LDS splitters who still practice polygamy. In recent years, TV has given audiences limited entrée into this world, either fictionally (as on Big Love) or with, for instance, exposés on Oprah; Jon Krakauer's (excellent) true crime book Under The Banner Of Heaven also offered a widely-read perspective on the history of the faith and on the kinds of crimes that some of its adherents have committed in recent years as the result of what they perceive to be divine direction. When FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs was convicted of child endangerment for having married and raped his underage wives, the shady world of FLDS came under scrutiny yet again.
As a fan of true crime and a judger of antisocial behaviour, Breaking The Faith is made just for me. If this exclusive trailer on The Wrap is anything to go by, the series will take us inside Jeffs's former compound, as several young women desperate to escape seek the help of a former follower who left the the town, and the faith.
Are "Joy Books" real? What's the biggest marital age gap in The Crick? What is it actually like to have dozens of siblings? Will the girls escape and, when they do, will they be horrified by Sister Wives? THESE ARE JUST A FEW OF THE QUESTIONS I AM HOPING THIS SHOW WILL ANSWER.
I'm trying to keep my expectations low, not just because it's TLC (which, earlier on the same night, will re-air a special about a woman who sells real estate to nudists), but also because I have no idea how producers will manage, technically and logistically, to make a TV show in a community this insular. However: I'm very interested to find out.
Breaking The Faith airs Sundays at 10 PM ET on TLC.