Considering that Laugh-In was a show with endless surrealism and double entendres, I’d say the problem with Turn-On was implementation, not concept.
I actually came in to say My Mother the Car so that one gets a second.
CBS, prime time. Beauty and the Beast. A show about a modern-day female newspaper reporter (Linda Hamilton), who falls in love with a guy who looks like a cross between a human and a lion in the face (Ron Perleman), who lives in the sewer. I’ll take my prize in large bills, please.
I think any show that is palmed off as a musical that doesn’t involve things where music is a part of it (like…say…Glee).
Yes that’s you Cop Rock
Yes that’s you Viva Laughlin.
No network has yet contacted me on my idea for a heartwarming family television series, “Cadaver Dog”*. I still think it would be boffo.
*First episode: “Timmy’s In The Well”.
Hole in the Wall’s winning for me so far. It sounds like something stoners in a Judd Apatow movie would dream up. I liked this from the Wiki entry though:
There’s a British daytime TV show, ‘Wanted Down Under,’ which currently comes on after the breakfast news, whose entire premise is ‘one parent wants to move to Australia, but the teenage kids don’t.’
I did actually watch one full episode and it was pretty good as location programmes go. It’s definitely not horrendous like most of the other shows mentioned, but just how many people are they going to get to take part? Somewhat limited concept, no?
I thought so too, but was persuaded to watch it, and now it’s one of my favourite shows.
Ugliest Girl in Town, a late sixties sitcom about a man who poses as a female fashion model(!) to stay in England with his girlfriend, certainly deserves mention. There isn’t anything inherently hopeless about a show with a crossdressing promise. But why a fashion model? Especially when the model looks like this?
Manimal.
Eh, there’s nothing *innately *horrible about the premise of “a shape-shifting man who possessed the ability to turn himself into any animal he chose. He used this ability to help the police solve crimes.”
He’s a shapeshifter with a mysterious past. She’s a tough-talking no-nonsense police detective/underwear model. Together they fight crime.
That’s a decent premise. It’s not the fault of the premise that the special effects are horrible, the writing is juvenile, and the acting is awful.
Wow. Turns out Manimal just aired 8 episodes. That’s all? It’s been a punchline for decades, based on 8 awful episodes?
It’s basically just a slightly more realistic version of Batman.
I’d say Small Wonder was a failure of execution, not concept. Awful acting, awful writing, creepy girl robot. Not to say that David Chase could have made it The Sopranos, but I don’t think the concept (man tries to pass off robot as his daughter) was doomed to fail so spectacularly. A concept like that wouldn’t be too out of place on Adult Swim nowadays. Sadly, they missed the Age of Irony.
I always thought that Small Wonder was about the same as any other 80’s sitcom. The only thing, at the time, that I found annoying was V.I.C.I. talking in a slow, monotone voice to sound “robotic”. Well, that and the fact that everyone thought that the way she talked and acted was perfectly normal.
With more self-doubt and no escapes from Arkham.
Psst… that’s August Pollak (a.k.a. “Some Guy With A Website”). Jackson was the splattery-paint dude.
I was going to mention “Manimal” but it’s been done, so I got nothin’.
“The Book of Lists” the TV series (1982). I loved the book itself, but how anyone thought it would translate well to TV is beyond me.
Of course they canceled it. Somebody must have figured out that it’s been done.
I don’t know, “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” was kind of the same and was IMHO a good show. Might have been better writers and the Host, Jack Palance, might have had something to do with it. But I don’t think the concept for the book of lists show was terrible. Maybe back to the whole “failure of execution” rather than failure of premise.
So, basically All In The Family with Nazis?
But that isn’t the creepiest part. The worst part is that the judge places the pubescent daughter to live together with her “two dads” (only one of which could be the father but which one can’t be determined because they have the same blood type), neither of which she knows, nor do they apparently know each other. Somehow she legally compels the guys to live together and jointly parent this young girl, even though one of them is not the father and neither of them have any experience with children. Creeptastic.
Stranger
My first thought was “My Mother The Car” but I can see it has already been mentioned and also that it isn’t even in the running.
This is slightly off topic but that, I think, is the wrong way to see Dexter. He isn’t some hero fighting for justice . He is a broken person who doesn’t feel anything about anyone and has a driving need to kill. In an effort to keep his son from becoming a true serial killer, his father channeled this need into having him kill people that “deserve” it.
The fact that bad people are stopped is incidental and just a side effect of Harry’s “rules”.
Batman has his own share of mental issues but he is a true hero; Dexter isn’t.
Dexter started that way but in the last couple of seasons he’s “grown” emotionally. I’m not sure why the writers have gone in this direction, my WAG is that they were looking for material to keep the show going. Personally, I think it was a bad direction.