A rocky road ahead. Kody Brown and his four wives — Meri, Christine, Janelle and Robyn — are coming back for season 16 of Sister Wives, and the family seems to be headed for more drama than ever.
A new supertease released by TLC on Tuesday, October 12, shows the four Brown women quarantining separately from each other during the coronavirus pandemic while Kody, 52, travels back and forth between houses.
“When it comes to the COVID virus, I’m not willing to gamble a family member’s life,” the Wyoming native says in a voiceover. “I’m the only one that’s going from home to home.”
While Kody’s system is designed to protect his family, his wives aren’t thrilled with the situation. “I don’t know if Kody even wants to see everybody all together again,” Christine, 49, says at one point. “Maybe he’s fine just living separate.”
In another scene, 43-year-old Robyn admits that she feels like “the foundation that our family was built on is, like, crumbling.”
Kody, for his part, is upset with Robyn for taking charge when he feels that he’s the only person who should make decisions for the Brown clan. “It’s pissing me off they’re looking to Robyn, like, for some kind of approval,” he says. “I don’t have a head wife in this family.”
The new season will follow the Browns’ move to Flagstaff, Arizona, which hasn’t gone smoothly for all of the wives. In the trailer, Christine shares again that she wants to move back to Utah.
“Why would I want to live on the same property with a dysfunctional marriage, where right over there he’s got a full functioning marriage?” she asks during a confessional interview. “Who would ever want to live like that?”
Earlier this year, Janelle, 52, revealed that she is living in an RV on the family’s Coyote Pass property in Arizona. “I acted boldly and seized an adventure,” she wrote via Instagram in June. “The rental where I was living was sold and I chose an alternative path to trying to find another rental. Not only is the housing market in Flagstaff as crazy as where you are I’m sure, rentals are even harder to come by. Presenting my new summer adventure — the RV life but camped on our property.”
It’s not clear whether the RV will be a part of the new season, but in the new video, Janelle joins her fellow wives in expressing her displeasure with Kody’s quarantine arrangement. “I’m at my wit’s end with this whole bull—t stuff,” she says.
Janelle, who wed Kody in 1993, previously told Us Weekly that she tries not to discuss her husband’s other relationships with him because she doesn’t want anyone else’s drama to affect her own relationship.
“It really kind of hurts when I see them not good because it sort of spills over into the families,” she told Us in March when season 15 was documenting Kody’s struggles with Meri, 50. “It doesn’t feel like everything’s completely calm, completely whole. I’m always trying to advocate and go to bat for both of them. And it’s a hard thing, I think, really for the whole family. When one relationship struggles, they all struggle.”
Season 16 of Sister Wives premieres on TLC Sunday, November 21, at 10 p.m. ET.
