Mostly reality TV is a misnomer thrown on any non-scripted program whether it’s a quiz show, a singing competition or an improv exercise like The Hills. But once in a while, a show like Jon & Kate Plus 8 displays real reality — maybe even too much.

The titular Gosselin couple had no luck getting knocked up so they gave fertility drugs a shot and popped out a pair of twin girls. A few years later they decided to add a third to their brood, again turning to science. Fate found this too tempting and delivered sextuplets — three girls and three boys.

How do you feed an extra six mouths when you’re not Brangelina? Invite cameras into your home — J&K+8 evolved from a one-hour special and is now into a third season — which also has the fringe benefit of keeping a watchful eye your offspring since you’d never have time to.

Though pretty patient in the grand scheme, the eightfold stresses often lead to exasperation — let’s just say Family Day at Chocolate World is easier said than done — which has led to considerable online rock-throwing at the Gosselins’ glass house.

Kate is admittedly pretty hardcore. She’s a clean freak with a mean streak towards her arguably overly laidback husband. Blogs and message boards are filled with flame wars slamming or defending Kate.

TelevisionWithoutPity.com briefly shuttered its J&K thread last week when the sniping got out of hand, including attempts to organize a boycott to protest Kate’s parenting, but the commentary got no nicer upon reopening. 

Of course, these judgmental posters don’t take into account the editing process, much less how overwhelming eight kids must be — the constant nose wiping, tear shedding, toilet training, fight quashing. Besides, Jon and Kate’s bickering paints a fuller picture of their lives. (“I’m sure there are plenty of perfect parents out there,” Kate admits, “but we aren’t any of them.”)

It helps that these kids are uniformly adorable and prone to hugging each other in matching outfits. But even counting the cuteness level, you’d think J&K might turn viewers off from wanting to reproduce — however it just makes you realize how easy it would be, in comparison, to raise only a couple of kids off-camera.

JON & KATE PLUS 8 AIRS MONDAYS, 9PM ON TLC.

Mother Sparkles online

Earlier this week, Canadian mall-pop star Robin Sparkles staged a comeback. No, you’re not forgetting some Debbie Gibson doppelganger. Sparkles actually made her singing debut in late 2006 as a plot device on the temporally unfixed sitcom How I Met Your Mother.

Sparkles is the early Alanis-like teen alter ego of Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) and went viral after HIMYM’s creators posted a MySpace page and music video for “Let’s Go to the Mall!”
They’ve seeded the internets with other faux sites, too. Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) writes a blog and a recent episode mentioned TedMosbyIsAJerk.com — created by a one-night-stand of Barney’s, who was pretending to be lead character Ted. It contained a now-legendary anti-Ted song, in the angry style of Alanis 2.0, which went on for an increasingly funny 20 minutes, culminating in a hilarious Battlestar Galactica riff: “You’re a Cylon and your only goal is total annihilation of the entire human race / I talked to my best friend Dr. Baltar and he told me / So don’t say that you love me!”

The new Sparkles ballad “Sandcastles in the Sand” boasts such lyrical gems as “Together we were gonna travel the globe, from Alberta to Ontario” and cameos from Alan Thicke, James Van Der Beek and, yes, even Tiffany.

Hopefully, the Sparkles buzz and the recent — non-embarrassing — Britney Spears cameo will be enough to get this awesome comedy renewed so HIMYM can one day answer its titular question.

HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER AIRS MONDAYS, 8:30PM ON CBS.