Polygamy is so last season—at least on Sister Wives, which returns to TLC with new episodes starting August 20.In the first trailer for Season 18 of the series that originally focused on Kody Brown and his four wives, viewers get a sneak peek at the drama that turned the family’s plural marriage into a singular one.
The clip opens where Season 17 left off, months after Kody’s third wife, Christine Brown, left him, kicking off the beginning of the end of the Brown family’s way of life
“Do you really still want to have a plural family?” Janelle Brown, the second of the women to marry Kody, asks in a quiet moment with him. “Sometimes I can’t tell.”
After Christine’s exit, Kody seemed to lose faith in the family dynamic he once heralded. While the father of 18 only has one legal wife, bride No. 4, Robyn Brown, his other “spiritual” marriages were crumbling around him. He and Janelle struggled with their own issues, and his relationship with first-wife Meri Brown had long been a tense and distant one, despite her efforts to rekindle their affections.
“I’m in this bad place with Janelle, and Christine is gone,” Kody says of it all. “Don’t even know what to do with Meri.”
Despite the fact that he hasn’t hid his lack of interest in Meri, she vows to stick around, whether Kody wants her to or not, because, as she puts it, “I still have hope.”
In the very next scene, Kody proves he doesn’t, as he wonders why she even lives in the same town as the rest of them.
However, it’s Janelle who first reveals she’s ready to move on.
During a dinner with her former sister wife, Christine, Janelle confesses, “I’m growing, and I need something different. Like, I don’t want to be married anymore.”
And if she had any lingering doubts about that, a later confrontation with Kody seems to seal the deal.
As the pair argue, Janelle fights for a moment to say her piece, telling Kody to “Shut your f—ing mouth and let me talk to you for a minute!”
He gets up and heads for the door.
“OK, so we’re done?” she asks. “F— you.”
It’s a far cry from the way they interacted during the early seasons of the show, when the reality TV spotlight first shone on their sprawling family. And it wasn’t the only uncomfortable interaction captured in the trailer.
Eventually, even Meri decides she’s had enough, but neither she nor Kody react emotionally to that news. Instead, it’s Robyn who weeps in the wake of the announcement, bemoaning what could have been.
“I wanted to sit on a porch with my sister wives, with our kids and our grandkids,” she says through tears.
Meanwhile Kody gives the impression that this is all leading to the start of his very own supervillain arc, as he tells the camera, “I worked so hard to do what was right, and when you lose that, well, I should just be the devil I think I am now.”
