Kate Gosselin is heading into half-empty-nest turf.
Her twins are going to college; two of her sextuplets are living with her ex-husband. She’s just four teen-agers away from rattling around an empty house. What’s next?
“We’ve been nudging her to date for years,” said Mandy Gosselin, 18, one of the twins.
So that will be another TV show; “Kate Plus Date” has a six-episode summer run.
Everything Gosselin does seems to be a realiy show. She did 11 seasons and 179 episodes raising the kids; she had a short run on “Dancing With the Stars,” a longer one on “Celebrity Apprentice.”
And now? She is, as TLC’s Howad Lee puts it, “ready to find love, or at least, like.”
That won’t be easy. “I was out of the dating loop for … maybe 20 years,” Gosselin said.
She’ll get guidance from:
— The twins, with some misgivings. “Imagining your mom on a date is not maybe your favorite thing,” Mandy said.
— Two matchmakers, Rachel DeAlto and Adam LoDolce. When he meets Gosselin on the show, LoDolce points out what many viewers already know: She has “a very hard shell.”
Gosselin didn’t approach this with optimism. Asked by the matchmakers what she was looking for, she said, she was stumped.
“I knew what I wasn’t looking for, but I could not easily articulate what I was looking for. I learned so much about myself …. I’m hard to watch at times.”
But she pushes ahead, in a multi-state search. “If I hadn’t found anyone in my local area in the last decade on my own, I decided to … cast a wider net.”
There’s New York (a two-and-a-half hour drive) and other cities. It’s all semi-new turf, Gosselin said. “There’s no other mom dating show out there.”
— “Kate Plus Date,” 10:01 p.m. Mondays, TLC
— Opener, June 10, reruns at 2:01 a.m.; then 11:02 p.m. Tuesday, 2 p.m. Saturday, 9 a.m. Monday (June 17)