The entertainment industry’s preoccupation with multiples is by no means a new thing; for example, there have been so many multiples-siblings movies that they can be divided into various subgenres. You have your multiple movies that take much of their conflicts from the fact that there are multiples in them (there’s more than one!?), such as the Parent Trap movies. There are not-really-multiples movies like the Schwarzenegger/DeVito wackiness vehicle, Twins. Then there are those movies about multiples which do not in fact feature multiples, but instead use one actor to play many characters. See Impact, Double. On top of these are all the other forms of multiple-birth-siblings entertainment, be they in reality TV form, or that of celebrity disasters. Such a preponderance of similar entertainments begs asking what it is about multiples that so fascinates.
The rise of fertility treatments aside, it’s not like multiples are a new thing. To use an admittedly hackneyed term, it’s because multiples are a nice, safe Other (disclosure: I have triplet sisters). And given the rise of political correctness etc., we aren’t allowed to gawk at as many peoples as we might once have; but we are still allowed to gawk — at least a little, a touch of gawking — at twins and so forth. We encounter multiples often enough that such encounters aren’t entirely unexpected, but they are, for most people, relatively rare. Moreover, multiples are just enough of an Other that gawking at them satisfies our urge (need?) to gawk. And my sisters won’t like this, but multiples fulfill a role: we single-births permit them to live among us, minor freaks that they are, and in exchange they provide us a safe outlet for our urges to stare and publicly nudge each other whenever we see something, um, different.