A local polyamorous family has been making headlines and, more recently, sharing their lives on television as they navigate the family dynamics of two relational couples raising multiple children together.
The closed quad family – Alysia and Tyler Rodgers, and Taya and Sean Hartless, Lebanon residents – are featured this season on TLC (The Learning Channel), a Warner Bros. Discovery television network.
The show, “Polyfamily,” consists of six episodes – the last two of which are yet to be released on May 27 and June 3. It is not known yet if there will be a second season.
Within the family dynamic, Sean Hartless is married to Taya Hartless, and Alysia Rodgers is his girlfriend. Tyler Rodgers is married to Alysia, and Taya is his girlfriend. Together they are raising five children.
“(The show) is following our relationship dynamics and kind of how we navigate challenges in our relationship in terms of, like, our non-romantic relationships and those challenges, the challenges of parenting,” Taya said.
According to a New York Post article, the couples met online in 2019 and fell in love. After having conversations about how to build a family together, they moved in together.
The Hartless and Rodgers couples have been together for nearly six years now, sharing a home, sharing beds, and sharing parenting responsibilities. The way it’s explained is the women have their own rooms and the men switch between rooms every night.
Before the union, the Rodgers’ had two children together. Since the union, the pairs have had three additional children. One aspect of “Polyfamily” explores the family’s choice to not learn who the children biologically relate to.
According to Alysia, the television crew filmed their family for about six months, starting in September 2023. While having cameras watching them was “definitely a new experience,” the former economic development director said she appreciated the opportunity to have parts of Linn County highlighted on the show as the couples visited different places.
“I really enjoyed being able to show off parts of our community – ’cause that’s just always something that’s near and dear to my heart – and being able to highlight those things,” she said.
But the meat of the story is about learning how to define their own unconventional relationships and find acceptance in society.
The family began openly sharing their lifestyle on social media three years ago and that, Taya said, is when the production company reached out to them with the opportunity to share their story on television.
“We plan on continuing to tell our story from our point of view on our social media and continue to share kind of our day to day, which has been really fun for us,” Taya said.
“We’ve found a really awesome community online, and a lot of those people are local to, at least, Oregon, which has been really fun. We do get recognized out in the community, and that can be really special, especially when those people are sharing that we’ve helped them either come out or learn something new, or just create talking points amongst their family and friends.”
In the show’s trailer, Alysia explains, “We never set out to live our lives like this, but we realized we could love more than one person and make our own rules as to what we want our family to look like.”
Brenda Lowry, communications consultant at Warner Bros., said TLC likes to explore topics about different kinds of people.
In the case of the Rodgers-Hartless couples, “it’s really more of a conversation about polyamory and how this works for their life, and just showing people different types of families that they’re maybe not aware of or that viewers haven’t had a chance to experience or see yet,” Lowry said.
The Rodgers’-Hartless’ intention in doing the show and sharing their lives on social media was to show people that they’re just like everyone else, Alysia said.
“Just because we look different, or may appear different, doesn’t mean that it’s bad,” she said. “We are a family just like everyone else and because there’s more of us, that just means that there’s more love to go around.”
In their six years together, the couples have received a lot of love and acceptance from the community, but they’ve also experienced judgment and rejection, Alysia said.
“This was our way to be able to kind of show polyamory on a larger platform and to be able to bring more awareness to polyamory and show that just because it’s different doesn’t mean that it’s bad,” she said.