On the cover of the current US Weekly — along with One Direction; Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge; and Gia Allemand, the “Bachelor” contestant who recently committed suicide — is a smiling young couple, Mackenzie Douthit and Josh McKee, captured on their wedding day.

They didn’t land on the cover via their talent, peerage or tragedy, but rather because of an unanticipated shift in the celebrity economy during the past few years.

In 2009 MTV introduced “16 and Pregnant,” a sort of cuddly horror docuseries. Episodes featured stories about pregnant teenagers, their difficult circumstances, their mostly deadbeat boyfriends and their adorable babies. It became a hit and eventually led to a spinoff, “Teen Mom,” which followed a handful of the young women as they tried to balance motherhood and, really, anything else.

Douthit is one of the stars of “Teen Mom 3,” the show’s third series, which walks a fine line between cautionary-tale documentary and tabloidization of an emotionally, logistically and financially challenging situation.

The stars of “Teen Mom 3” — Douthit, Briana DeJesus, Katie Yeager and Alex Sekella — are all alumnae of “16 and Pregnant,” the feeder docudrama, and their stories are distressingly familiar by now. The men are, in every case, ciphers, and also very much boys — young, pretty, husks of proto-masculinity crippled with dismal eye contact and a fundamental inability to speak full sentences when being interrogated by their girlfriends, or their girlfriends’ parents.

Whatever joy may have once been a part of these shows is largely gone, leaving them essentially exercises in masochism, especially because they’ve been running long enough for viewers to know what comes afterward. Amber Portwood, a graduate of the first “Teen Mom,” has dealt with legal and drug issues and is in jail. Farrah Abraham, also from the first series, recently turned to pornography.

Such stumbles reveal how these young women are working without a safety net; there’s a wide gap between being given a huge stage and having the tools to use it wisely. Worse, they presumably rely on the money the series provides them for participating. (A couple of years ago Portwood told a judge she earned $140,000 for a six-month contract with the show.)

There’s no mention of this on the show, though, which doesn’t bother dwelling on the toxic overlap between documenting and enabling. That’s a problem no photo on the cover of US Weekly can obscure, or fix.