We have more than one television in our house. In fact, there are about as many televisions as there are people.

I am sometimes intrigued by what the fellow residents of our home are watching. Because I live here, I'm going to avoid naming names.

In the early evenings, one of the residents is watching a channel that rebroadcasts that day's soap operas. The show is "The Young and the Restless." I watched this show 25 years ago, and some of the same crowd is still on there.

They are not as young as they used to be. I haven't watched long enough to find out how restless they are.

I love the time element on soap operas. They'll put a woman in the hospital for a disease that has no cure and in about three days in soap opera time, it will be Christmas. Five soap opera days later and it's the Fourth of July.

There is also a lot of watching of The Food Channel. We seemed to be transfixed on shows that involve making cakes that look like the Statue of Liberty or Rock City. What's the big deal about making a 5-foot-tall cake and then moving it to a table without spilling it?

But the show that has caught my attention is this saga called "Jon & Kate Plus 8."

Jon and Kate are a young couple who had twin girls. They wanted one more. They ended up with six more in one batch.

Somebody at a cable network decided that it would be a good thing to bring in TV cameras and put their life on display for everybody to see. Once again, there should be a light or a buzzer that goes off in your head that says, "This may not be a good idea."

Then again, these people went out and had six kids. Draw your own conclusions.

When the show started, Kate looked like a woman who had six kids. She found stardom and now has a fru-fru hairdo and somebody does her makeup.

Jon hasn't missed his ride on the vanity train either; one episode featured him getting hair plugs to fill in his balding pate.

Every week, Jon and Kate would sit down on a love seat and talk about what had happened on the episode. She would interrupt and correct Jon - she often didn't let him get a word in edgewise. It was a two-person sofa, but it just didn't seem like there was much love there.

Leading up to this week's season premiere, there have been stories on every magazine in the grocery store checkout lines about Jon being out with some other woman. Then came the stories that Kate was involved with her bodyguard.

This week's show featured Jon and Kate sitting about as far apart as you can on a love seat. They didn't look like they wanted to be there.

Hey Jon and Kate, if you didn't want your marriage to go in the tank, why did you invite a TV crew to move in with you?

They are the real young and restless - or maybe the inane and superfluous.

I'm changing the channel.

Harris Blackwood is a columnist for The Times. His column runs every week in Sunday Life.