Season 14 of My Big Fat Fabulous Life arrives on Tuesday, November 10 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on TLC with a new city, a new fiancé, and a new era for Whitney Way Thore. But ask longtime fans what they will be thinking about when the premiere opens, and many will give the same answer: the woman who is not there. Barbara “Babs” Thore died on December 7, 2022, and Season 14 will be the fourth season without her. Nearly four years on, her absence is still the show’s quietest storyline — and its most emotional one.
The Scene-Stealer Who Never Auditioned
When the show premiered on January 13, 2015, Whitney was the star and Babs was supposed to be the supporting cast. It did not stay that way for long. Viewers fell for her Southern charm, her perfectly timed remarks, and the way she could deflate any drama with a single sentence. She teased Whitney mercilessly and offered dating advice nobody asked for.
“You’re the Best Mommy”: The Tribute Fans Still Rewatch
Whitney announced her mother’s death on Instagram on December 8, 2022,. “My mother died last night just as the credits rolled on her favorite movie,” she wrote. “Dad, Hunter, and I held her as she took her last breaths. It was 10:32pm, the same exact time she brought me into this world almost forty years ago.” She called Babs “our family’s greatest gift.”
When Season 11 premiered on September 5, 2023, TLC and Whitney posted a tribute video captioned “To the ‘Bab-ulous’ wife, mother, and friend.” It ended with the two of them lying in bed together: “You’re the best mommy,” Whitney said. “I know. You’re the best daughter,” Babs replied.
The Secret in the Attic — and the Wisdom Underneath
Babs was funny precisely because she was human. In 2019, Whitney and her brother Hunter found a wedding album in the attic and realized the bride was their mother — but the groom was not their dad. Babs confessed she had married young, at 17, in a first marriage that lasted four years and ended in divorce, long before she met Glenn in 1976. Glenn, whom she married in 1977, was the love of her life.
Her advice on marriage, captured in the tribute video, was disarmingly simple: “The secret to 39 years of marriage is to love each other.” It now echoes through every Season 14 conversation about Whitney’s engagement to Jake Beaudoin, announced to People on August 18, 2026. Fans now ask whether the new marriage will carry that same warmth.
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Here is the part that stings. Whitney is planning a wedding, chasing the motherhood dream she has carried for a decade, and building a new life in Charlotte — all the milestones a mother would normally be in the front row for. But the kitchen table where Babs held court in Greensboro is gone, and no new city can replace it.
Babs’s final stroke came on November 13, 2022, from cerebral amyloid angiopathy, an untreatable condition that causes brain bleeding. Season 11 opened with her funeral, filmed at the family’s request because, as Whitney told People, Babs was loved so publicly that she deserved to be mourned publicly.
So the question is not just whether Whitney and Jake make it down the aisle. It is whether the show still has room for the woman who made it feel like family. Some fans want an on-screen nod at the wedding. Others say the kindest tribute is a happy new chapter, lived fully, without turning every milestone into a memorial. Where do you stand: should Season 14 honor Babs out loud, or is the best way to honor her simply to let Whitney be happy? Team Honor Her, or Team New Chapter?
