Just about every long-running or critically acclaimed show has at least one major stinker in its run. It’s just inevitable when you have so many episodes, some of them are gonna be duds. Sometimes, these episodes can be just as well-known as the great episodes.
I’ll start with Code of Honor from TNG. Everything, from the racist undertones thanks to the baffling decision to make the actors playing a primitive alien race who lust after strong women black to the terrible fight scene makes me wonder how anybody involved thought this episode was a good idea.
Any show that did a boxing episode. Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica are the offenders that come to mind first. Total crap from series that were generally excellent.
The damn hamster, mouse, frog, or gold fish that dies while the kid is away and the parents scramble to find an exact look-alike. More of a cliche, but any show with a kid in it seems by law has to have a show with this scenario.
**Letterkenny **is a near-perfect show but for some reason in their first season they put out an episode called “Fartbook.” It’s Facebook for farts. The episode is terrible and skippable.
Any time a long running sitcom did a clip show. The Wonder Years was a good show, but when I was rewatching it on Netflix and got to the clip show episode I was just like “Why al I watching this? I just saw this stuff not that long ago.”
As I sit here watching The Next Generation Star Trek, I would have to say ANY episode that uses the Holodeck. I cannot remember a single one that made a good use of the program.
It was as if the holodeck allowed the writers to abandon the “where no one has gone before” about, you know, actual space stuff, and just make shit up.
So much Elizabethan stage plays. I’m sure the writers and actors thought it was a good idea because that is their background. It was all laziness. That allowed them to put on a stage play, inside a starship.
I’ll start with Code of Honor from TNG. Everything, from the racist undertones thanks to the baffling decision to make the actors playing a primitive alien race who lust after strong women black to the terrible fight scene makes me wonder how anybody involved thought this episode was a good idea.
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As I sit here watching The Next Generation Star Trek, I would have to say ANY episode that uses the Holodeck. I cannot remember a single one that made a good use of the program.
It was as if the holodeck allowed the writers to abandon the “where no one has gone before” about, you know, actual space stuff, and just make shit up.
So much Elizabethan stage plays. I’m sure the writers and actors thought it was a good idea because that is their background. It was all laziness. That allowed them to put on a stage play, inside a fucking starship.
“Family” from Next Generation. Cliche upon cliche. Worf’s Jewish parents are a tired stereotype and the Wesley’s father being all noble and nonsensical.
But Picard was the worst. The estrangement with his brother was by the book and the mud wrestling resolution just ludicrous. The fact that Picard had a British accent while his brother had a French one needed an explanation, at least.
The production team wanted to try doing an episode without space battles and “Family” was so derided that they decided they needed to always include a space battle or the like. But they drew the wrong conclusion: I think the fans would have accepted more interpersonal drama (despite the fact that ST:TNG wasn’t supposed to have any), but it had to be more compelling than a soap opera plotline.
My first thought was a TNG episode as well - Rascals.
The Simpsons - Another Simpsons Clip Show. To be fair, this one has an excuse. When Fox got the TV rights to the NFC half of NFL in April, 1994, the network decided that it would start its fall season earlier than planned, to coincide with the start of the regular season. However, it wanted four new episodes of The Simpsons, and it only had two that were completed. A repeat of the episode where Lisa becomes an expert in picking NFL winners, with a couple of changes to reference the stations that had switched to Fox because of the NFL, was added, but it was still one short, so the show’s staff cobbled together a clip show in about half the time it usually takes to produce an episode, and it showed.
It’s been a long time since I watched The West Wing but I remember not being impressed by the “Isaac and Ishmael” episode, which was in response to the 9/11 attacks. (To be fair, it’s not an easy thing to address in a fictional show.)
I always wondered if these episodes were just based on whatever the writers saw was available hanging on the racks in the costume department. I agree they’re mostly cringeworthy.
Futurama is possibly my favorite show of all time. But it has definitely had its share of clunkers, and the one that stands out to me the most is “A Pharaoh To Remember”, which is basically just 22 minutes of Bender being a jerk to everyone else (he’s usually one, but the other cast members are generally given more to do than just take it), with a veneer of “ancient Egypt” laid on top of it.
MAS*H - the worst episode has to be “Hawkeye”, in which Hawkeye gets some sort of head injury and spends the entire rest of the episode performing a monologue to keep himself awake. I don’t recall if any of the rest of the cast appeared in it at all, but certainly not much.
South Park - Despite the general recent downturn in quality, the nadir of the series has to be “A Million Little Fibers” which has this weird running conversation between Oprah Winfrey’s nether orifices. No, you really don’t want to watch the episode just to see what the heck I’m talking about (if you’ve never seen it).
Remington Steele: “Illustrated Steele,” the one with the daily comic strip artist. Quantum Leap: “A Portrait for Troian,” the one where Donald Bellisario’s entire frickin’ family gets their SAG cards.
Barney Miller: “Rape,” the one where marital rape is milked for comedy.
This is mostly awful because social norms have changed and marital rape is now generally recognized as rape. But Barney Miller was, by and large, a very progressive show which one might have expected to handle such a topic better.