Jinger Duggar Says Reality TV Return Would Be ‘Drastically Different’

Jinger Duggar spent more than a decade in front of the reality TV cameras and now, five years after Counting on she’s done, she doesn’t seem like she wants to come back.

Duggar, 31, and her husband Jeremy Vuolo talked about the possibility of returning to reality in the January 22 episode “The Jinger and Jeremy Podcast.” The 19 Children and counting the alum thought about it, but admitted that she wouldn’t be able to recapture the nostalgia of the past.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” she said. “Not now. Not at this time of life.”

She qualified it by saying that if she were to do another reality show, it wouldn’t be “watching all aspects of life,” as Vuolo, 37, put it. However, Duggar added that she misses “certain aspects” of reality TV.

Related: Jinger Duggar and Jeremy Vuolo’s Relationship Timeline

Jinger Duggar and Jeremy Vuolo’s love story may have been a whirlwind — but their bond is undeniably strong. The couple was introduced through Jinger’s sister Jessa Duggar and her husband Ben Seewald, who met the former soccer star in Texas before he visited the Duggar family in Arkansas. Jinger reflected on the early days (…)

“You’ve got sweet memories of traveling and stuff all these years, but it’s not all the same,” she said. “Because you wouldn’t have the same film crew, you wouldn’t have the same people you work with. And you’re not filming as a larger family unit, so there are a lot of things that would be so drastically different if you did the show again.”

The the sixth of 19 Duggar children in the TLC reality franchise, Jinger first rose to fame in 2008, when the show, then called 17 Children and countingpremiered. She later appeared in the spinoff series, Counting onwhich took place between 2015 and 2020.

Now, she and Vuolo have two children with a third maturity in March. Vuolo, a former professional footballer, is now a minister. The couple wrote a memoir titled, The Hope We Hold: Finding Peace in God’s Promisesin 2021 and seem content to have closed the reality TV chapter of their lives.

Vuolo compared it to the end of his football career. Although he competed in MLS for the New York Red Bulls and then in the now-defunct NASL, he left in 2014 to focus on the ministry.

“It was a chapter,” he said. “It closed and I said, ‘Yeah, done.’ The Lord was leading me in a different direction.”

He empathized with Duggar’s sentiment that it’s “not the same,” adding that it’s good to have a “healthy break” between chapters.

“Otherwise you’re constantly living in the past,” he said. “And if there’s too much nostalgia, it can lead to this depression because you’re like, ‘Man, I’m never going to get that back,’ or ‘I’m never going to have this opportunity again.’