Netflix's Queer Eye has helped many of its heroes find love, but sadly, one of the show's most iconic stars isn't getting the happily ever after he hoped for. On Thursday, September 5, Queer Eye's Tom Jackson announced he and his wife Abby Parr had split, revealing that their divorce had been finalized for the second time around.
Jackson, who appeared in the very first episode of the rebooted Queer Eye, told his social media followers that "The roller coaster ride is over. Abby and I got divorced again." The Georgia resident also revealed that the pair's split was "final [on] Wednesday September 4th." Jackson's episode of Queer Eye saw him reconnect with his ex-wife, Parr, and impress her with his new look and renovated space.
While the Fab Five — Bobby Berk, Antoni Porowski, Jonathan Van Ness, Karamo Brown, and Tan France — have not publicly commented on Jackson and Parr's split, the Netflix stars have previously spoken about how much the pair's love story moved them while filming. In a May 2018 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Brown revealed that the touching reunion at the heart of that first episode, "You Can't Fix Ugly," was entirely unplanned.
After revealing that the Fab Five had originally planned to help Jackson "move on" and meet someone new, Brown explained, "Antoni shifted that episode," after picking up on one of their hero's comments about his ex-wife. "Antoni catching that one [comment where Tom mentions Abby] literally cut my scene [revamping his dating profile] out, which I’m happy about. All of a sudden we are on a bench and I’m like, 'Call your ex-wife!' [to invite her to the car show]."
Porowski's intuition laid the ground work for one of Queer Eye's most touching, if unpredictable, love stories. Shortly after the show premiered in February 2018, Jackson tweeted that he and Parr were "no longer together," but revealed a month later that "Abby and I are reunited," on social media. "We’ve loved each other for many years and want to spend the rest of our lives together!!!!!!!!" he wrote. Less than a week later, Jackson revealed that he and Parr were engaged on Twitter; the couple eloped in a intimate ceremony in Tennessee in May 2018.
While the Fab Five weren't in attendance on the big day, they all shared their best wishes for the reunited couple in the press, where they spoke about how touched they were by the pair's love story. "Watching Tom with Abby was the most beautiful thing. You can tell how much he loves her," France told Entertainment Tonight at the time. "They've been married already and there's gotta be something there if he's so desperately wanting to marry her again. I couldn't be happier for him. He's one of the nicest men I've ever met in my life."
Berk also told ET that they weren't the only ones who swooned over the pair's reunion. "The whole world saw all the love reblossom on the first episode of Queer Eye," he said. "We couldn't be more happy. You can see it when he would say her name because his eyes would light up and his whole face would start to glow." Berk continued, "And then that moment when they were sitting outside on his patio table and they were eating guacamole and she touched his arm, we were like [aww] and she called him Thomas."
While Jackson and Parr's rekindled romance didn't work out, it's clear that his story and journey on Queer Eye continues to impact and move both fans of the show and the Fab Five themselves. And if the Netflix series has taught us anything, it's that it's never too late to start over.
