TV Eye: Keep it in the family - please

Jon, Kate and their eight million children. Photo / Supplied

They divorced on December 18, 2009. But in the strange and timeless world that is Sky's Living Channel, all was still well in the lives of Jon and Kate and their eight million children on Tuesday night.

Jon & Kate Plus 8 - I may have slightly exaggerated the number of sprogs they have - has been a reality-TV phenomenon in the United States, attracting, at its peak, nearly 10 million viewers. Since 2006, the Gosselins' super-sized family of twins and sextuplets has been the subject of five series and three specials, with the family pumping out the five series, totalling some 115 half-hour episodes, in just two years between 2007 and 2009. There have been books too, including one that should have been called Mixed Blessings but was, instead, titled Multiple Blessings.

All this might have passed me by if had been for the rather merciless ribbing the Gosselins starting taking last year from various late-night talk-show hosts when it became evident that being an IT analyst and married with eight children wasn't quite enough for Jon. He was reportedly found to be spreading the love even further, with a bit on the side.

Since then there's been the usual tabloid paper and TV babbling and jabbering. But there have even been - how did this take so long? - allegations last year that the kids weren't doing much more than sweated labour, with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor investigating whether Jon & Kate Plus 8 conformed to the state's child labour laws.

If you're thinking so far, so dull, well you should have a gander at the show.

It's hardly a new observation that so much of reality TV is, well, if not unreality then fake-ality. But not on Jon & Kate. It's so banal, so utterly dull, it can only be true.

Having explained in the opening voiceover how the hell you end up with eight rugrats - predictably, fertility treatment - the rest of the episode consisted of a trip to some godforsaken Pennsylvania farm for what Kate told us was an annual family ritual, pumpkin picking. Chaos ensued. Evidently it takes quite a bit to organise eight kids for a trip. Who would have guessed?

Between the scenes at the farm, Jon and Kate offered reflections of this truly amazing, boring day out and gave some insight, between bickering, into their lives. Jon shared that he and Kate were "perfect team mates". Kate shared that she and Jon were "a good team". We saw this in action when, horrors, a fly was spotted in the family kitchen.

"Jon you have got to do something about this fly, it's becoming increasingly buggy," said Kate. Jon then belted the fly with a paper, albeit on the bench, which led to protests from Kate. Yes, they made a good team in dispatching the poor fly.

The pumpkin picking, followed by apple picking and a wander through a maze, though extremely dreary, did seem to demand the logistical requirement of an army going to war. And, as is the American way, it didn't seem to have any planned exit strategy, particularly when one of the multitudinous Gosselins appeared to have, to use Jon's word, "pooped".

Only in America. Well, actually, no, not only in America. You see it was a bit of a week for when families go bad on the telly, the other being the Lundys of Palmerston North. I couldn't help but watch last week's Beyond the Darklands, for the simple reason that murderer Mark Lundy's legal team had tried to stop this episode going to air.

That the appalling murders of two people can be dished up as entertainment is, I suppose, par for the course these days. But quite why we had to have the annoying and increasingly ubiquitous psychologist Nigel Latta explaining rather obvious facts - apparently Lundy was "not normal" - remains a mystery.

The show should have been stopped from airing all right. Not for the sake of Lundy's legal manoeuvres, but for the show's total lack of necessity. It seemed a pointless run through a very high-profile case, illustrated by a series of re-created scenes executed by performers exhibiting the same poor acting ability Lundy displayed at his wife and child's funeral.

Oh well. Though it did occur that this narcissistic murderer's story might be apropos for the Gosselins. According to Latta, public humiliation of the sort Lundy had in childhood is bad, very bad. In which case Jon and Kate might want to watch out when all those young Gosselins start hitting puberty.