Ellen DeGeneres' highly anticipated TV return has been met with swift backlash from unimpressed fans and critics.

DeGeneres apologised at the start of her 18th season premiere and addressed the toxic workplace rumours that have followed her for months.

“Sometimes I get sad. I get mad. I get anxious. I get frustrated. I get impatient. And I am working on all of that. I am a work in progress,” she said.

She also joked that while she’s a “pretty good actress” having played a “straight woman in movies” she said she isn’t good enough to “come out here every day for seventeen years and fool you”.

She also alluded to the toxic workplace claims, saying that the company have "made the necessary changes" without revealing what they are.

Within five minutes, DeGeneres had moved on and introduced her first guest, comedian Tiffany Haddish.

Fans weren't as quick to move on, going to Twitter to voice their disapproval about the "quite bad" apology.

"The Ellen apology was quite bad, right?" one user asked his followers.

"Ellen's apology made no sense to me because she seems to base it on the idea that people mistake impatience, sadness and bad moods for being unkind. That's not really how it works," another explained.

“Ellen DeGeneres using her first monologue back after allegations of a toxic work environment to make jokes about how she‘s impatient and not a good enough actress to fake being a nice person for 18 years just grosses me out,” wrote another Twitter user.

TV critics also questioned the apology, which was first posted to social media six hours before the season premiere of The Ellen Show.

Jezebel noted: “Absent from this speech about kindness, however, was an acknowledgment of the remarkably unkind things that allegedly happened under DeGeneres’s long tenure as the head of The Ellen Show.”

The Daily Beast called it “a strange apology that’s unlikely to appease anyone.”

Variety declared the monologue “fell short”.

“It’s hard not to feel as though an opportunity was missed here,” they wrote, imagining what had happened if DeGeneres had spoken in more detail about feeling “mad, anxious and frustrated” in the past. “Going a bit deeper — being something other than blithely kind to an audience that craves real connection — might have been welcome.”