And the vote is in-- The critics hate the new season!

US Mag has a nice article citing several media outlets as hating the J & K machine.

Critics Pan Season 5 Premiere of Jon & Kate Plus 8
Tuesday May 26, 2009

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."