The verdict is in on “Jon and Kate Plus Eight”, and the television critics are absolutely disgusted. CB did her review of the premiere episode earlier today, and she was pretty revolted too. For major newspapers, my understanding is that many of them get to see previews of the entire season of certain television shows, so many critics are chiming in with how horrible Kate and Jon are throughout this whole fifth season. One critic calls Kate a “silly, self-absorbed fool” while another claims that the show is “adding up to disaster”. You think? Many have pointed out that Kate seems self-obsessed and oblivious to anything other than her own issues and putting herself out there as a wronged woman being martyred for her family. Critics aren’t buying that, but there’s not a hell of a lot of criticism for Jon, other than a desire to see him come clean about his affair:

Despite all the tears on the dramatic season five premiere of TLC’s Jon & Kate Plus 8, critics weren’t so sympathetic toward Jon and Kate Gosselin.

At one point in the show, Kate complained that her life was “just so hard” due to media attention and pressures on her marriage.

“Is it really, Kate?” sniped the Baltimore Sun’s David Zurwik. “Tell that to a family in which the breadwinner has just lost her or his job, you silly, self-absorbed fool.”

New Jersey’s Star Ledger also calls out Kate for her hypocrisy over the paparazzi. In a voiceover on Monday’s premiere, she says that she tells her kids to call the paparazzi “the P-people” because “I don’t want them going to school being like, ‘Well, the paparazzi is following us, like, that’s so creepy.'”

Says the Star Ledger: “What’s creepy is having your children followed around by a camera crew. Any camera crew. Period. It’s exploitation, whatever cutesy name you want to give it.”

Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly notes that Kate made it a point to say she was “alone” about six times on Monday’s premiere. (At one point on the show, she complained that “Jon decided he needed a weekend off,” so she had to organize the 5-year-old sextuplets’ birthday party by herself.)

Says EW: “You just wanted to say, ‘We get it! You feel you’re the Wronged Woman! Aren’t you savvy enough by now to know you’re not winning us over?’ This was especially true when she noted that ‘all of a sudden, your kids are calling you your babysitter’s name.’ I could almost hear millions of viewers shouting, ‘So stay home!'”

Sarah Kickler Kelber of The Baltimore Sun also takes aim at Jon — who clearly did not want to be on the show — for not opening up about his marital problems. On the show, he denies cheating on his wife but vaguely apologizes for his “actions.”

“It would be so much clearer if they would just say their version of what happened,” Kelber writes. “This is just more complicated than it needs to be. It’s not like they aren’t used to sharing the details of their lives, you know? We saw Jon’s hair-transplant surgery as it happened, and Kate recovering from her tummy tuck, and the kids going through potty training. Most of that was probably too much information, but now we aren’t quite getting enough.”

What was most evident after Monday’s premiere is that the tone on the TLC show has changed. The Philadelphia Enquirer. even goes as far as to declare that the show is “adding up to disaster.”

Zurwik of The Sun echoes that sentiment. “For all the nasty and stupid reality shows I have seen over the years, I have to say this one did leave me feeling like I was looking in on something that I shouldn’t be watching,” he writes.

“What I saw was two people in over their heads, with one of them trying in her incredible arrogance to act like she knew what she was doing — and an off-camera voice playing the melodrama of these lives for all it was worth,” says Zurwik. “The kids mostly got lost in all of that.”

Says EW’s Tucker, “It’s going to be interesting to see how the series settles back into its weekly half-hours of family outings and squabbles — to see if that’s even possible.”

[From US Weekly]

Can reality shows “jump the shark”? I think this is a case in point – yes, they can. People are watching this stuff now for the same reason we slow down for a car wreck. That gross curiosity that’s in all of us. Neither Kate nor Jon has every seemed like the world’s best parent or best person, so perhaps it’s time to call it day. On the television show, at least.

Kate Gosselin is shown on 5/22/09. Credit: Bauergriffinonline