that NOBODY mentioned “HEE HAW”. This was without a doubt, the most cretinous excuse for comedy ever offered! The jokes were moronic, the delivery lame, and most of the actors made the cast of “THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES” look like geniuses!
While it’s fun to reminisce, most of these are clearly not
the worst TV shows ever.
And I don’t know how someone could say “The Brady Bunch”
instead of the Brady Bunch Variety show or the hourlong
soap opera, “Brady.”
The worst shows of all time have been entirely forgotten,
except maybe that Pink Lady one - that has potential.
I’d nominate a bunch of early Fox shows that I only remember because the promos are on old Simpsons archived
tapes of mine.
"Women in Prison" - self-explanatory.
"Babes" - the premis was these women were overweight, and brassy.
"Second Chance" - actually gone before the Simpsons ever
aired, I just remember it. Guy has to come back in time
after death to guide his young self on the path of good.
**“Some Show About a Real Estate Office, the Focus of Which was an Utterly Unlikeable B****y Woman” ** - can’t remember the name.
Dusty’s Trail, actually. Yes folks, they took Gilligan’s Island and made it into a western. Same seven character types and all. Indians instead of natives, etc. Now this was bad.
Sounds like “Open House,” which was a spinoff of one of the original batch of FOX shows, “Duet.” The only notable thing about “Open House” is that Ellen DeGeneres had a regular part as a secretary.
Hey! Manimal was cool! Well, the special effects were kind of cool, anyway.
Full House. Family safe, at the cost of your everlasting soul.
The Golden Girls. Ugh.
Family Matters. There IS a God, and He hates me.
**AKA Pablo.[b/] Paul Rodreguez deserves every bit of his failed movie career after starring in this.
There was an old TV series that came out right after Tron. It involved some kind of electric neon blue guy who could digitally grow his own car that could do 90 degree turns without slowing down. It was every bit as bad as that sounds.
Finally, there was another crappy sci fi series about two guys who built a rocket ship out of junk. the idea was, buy lifting off SLOWLY, there wouldn’t be any G forces or major fuel consumption to worry about. This junk ship actually achieved orbit. I want whatever the writers of this show were smoking.
Oh, yeah. Too Close For Comfort, anyone?
Alice Cooper on Pink Lady, or a pre-Saturday Night Live Bill Murray on Howard Cosell actually made those programs worth watching, if only in retrospect.
If you want really bad, look to the stuff the networks threw in as filler, like news and documentaries.
Industry on Parade – 30 mind-numbing minutes each week on topics like “how steel is made.”
Summer Sunday USA – Want to know how talented professionals can screw up a newsmagazine? See if you can talk anyone involved into showing you a tape of this!
ABC News with Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters – I hate you. I hate you even more. And now, here’s the news.
Tomorrow Coast to Coast – Co-hosted by Tom Snyder and Rona Barrett. Not only did they hate each other, but either one of them alone was obnoxious. Almost worth watching for a famous sign-off line. “Tom, I’ll see you TOMORROW.” “Not if I see you first.”
Life Is Worth Living – A genuine Roman Catholic bishop offering uplifting and inspirational stories. For 30 minutes. Every week.
CBS Morning News/Morning/This Morning/Morning Show, etc. – Pretty much all bad, although I particularly recommend the Sally Quinn and Phyllis George eras.
Election Night 1980 – I know, it’s not technically a program, but it bears special mention. The networks called the election 15 minutes after the polls closed on the East Coast, and then were stuck trying to fill the next five hours.
Lizard, may I express to you my utmost and eternal gratitude for pointing out that “Will and Grace” is a terrible TV program? I’d like to try an experiment and count how many tired and/or obvious gay jokes there are per episode, but I can’t watch that sludge long enough to get a decent reading.
Then I see things like “W & G” is voted the best comedy on TV? What?! Nothing but tortured “pop culture” references and catty “repartee.” Ugh!
“The New People” a post-apocalyptic half hour with hippies around 1969. Scared the cr@p out of me, though. When I mentioned it to a TV writer I worked with ten years ago, he said it was superficial bilge even a kid could see through. I would love to see a tape of it tofind out what scared me so.
Lexx
Lexx
Lexx
Lexx
It’s on the Sci-Fi channel, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Picture this:
A dead assassin who’s been brought back from the dead somehow and tries to be a force for justice. An oversexed middle-aged janitor who pilots their living ship, which subsists by blowing up planets and eating them. A beautiful woman in skimpy clothes and with noticeably collagen-injected lips who’s the lust object of the janitor guy, and a computer-generated head in a monitor that constantly, whiningly obsesses over his homosexual love for the dead guy in a way that even I, who am not easiy offended, think is demeaning to homosexuals.
It’s just awful. However, if nothing else is on, I’ll watch it just to see if it can possibly get worse.
I’m usually not disappointed. 
I may have missed it but has no one mentioned “Saved by the Bell”?!? C’mon!
Automan. I remember loving that show, although in retrospect, that doesn’t mean much. I had low standards.
First off, Kindred had potential. It just didn’t reach it.
Watching Lexx is like watching a couple make out in a moving vehicle as they crash into colorful costume and bdsm shop. I like the assassin character. I even like the Zev character. But when this show goes bad, it’s almost painful to watch.
And in any case Black Scorpion is so hideous that it makes Lexx forgivable in comparison.
“Turn-on” was excruciatingly bad. “Laugh-In” without the laughs.
And if you go back far enough, there’s “The Big Picture” – a series of military recruiting documentaries.
“Full House” has the distinction of running all those years without a single funny thing happening. And if you consider “America’s Lamest Home Videos,” it’s obvious that when Bob Sagat calls himself a comedian, he’s using a definition no one else has ever used.
“V” was a milestone in stupid science ficion. I skipped the miniseries, but caught a few episodes of the series, mostly because Jane Badler was the daughter of my mother’s college roommate. My mother made the definitive comment when she said that the wedding of the two aliens looked just like a Jewish Wedding, only instead of stepping on a wineglass, they ate a rat. I gave up when they brought back a dead alien. It was explained that the alien was the twin brother of the original one. Hello? All the aliens wore masks – all you needed to say was that someone else liked the mask and took it. But why do something simple and clever when there is a cliche left untouched?
“Land of the Giants.” Irwin Allen’s SF series were all bad, but this was by far the worst.
“Will and Grace” isn’t egregiously bad, just mediocre. I have no idea why it wins awards, however.
Sounds like “Salvage 1”
Automan! Thank you! I remember kind of liking it back then, but I was a kid, ya know?
Anyone remember The Misfits Of Science? Courtney Cox wishes you didn’t. The theme sound still lingers in my head, like the theme song to The Greatest American Hero. This is not a complement.
“Nearly Departed” I never would have watched this crime against nature, except that it was Eric Idle’s first U.S. starring series. He played a ghost (“only you can see and hear me” – how original). The show was devoid of laughs or logic. For instance, one of the characters had to pass an eye test and has lost his glasses. So Idle contorts his body into the letters. Why doesn’t he just say them – no one could hear him? Because that wouldn’t be funny. Well, what we saw wasn’t funny, either.
It was a pathetic waste of a great talent. Nudge, nudge.
By the time the series ended, Suzanne Somers wasn’t even on it.
(I have real trouble advocating ignorance in any form, but I kinda hate the fact that I knew that.)
RealityChuck, the first “V” miniseries was actually quite good. The arrival and rise to prominence of the aliens was played as an allegory to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.
Obviously, there are shows so bad, you all have purged them from your collective memories. You’re mentioning the easy targets.
Let me take you back to 1993. It was a good year. The plan to map the entire genetic structure of humans, Human Genome Project, launched in San Diego in '93. NBC, on the other hand, countered with The Mommies. Yes, folks, Caryl Kristensen and Marilyn Kentz teamed up to give us one of the worst half hours on television weekly. Have they stopped peddling dishwashing liquid, by the way?
That same year, CBS decided to stop torturing it’s viewing audience by ending the short-lived The Golden Palace. Don’t remember that show? It was a spin-off of The Golden Girls. That’s right, they opened a hotel. It lasted one season. It didn’t even have Bea Arthur, for cryin’ in the wind!
Let’s travel forward to, arguably, the first year of the new millennium. NBC, putting it’s best foot forward, gives us Daddio. Good gracious…
Damn, thought I’d be the one to mention “Turn On”, a show so legendarily bad that one network affiliate is said to have cancelled the show halfway through its premiere. A show that included “skits” like flashing the word SEX on the screen while two people made faces at the camera. A show so godawful that the producers asked that the tapes be locked away and never shown again. Surely, this program takes the crown!
As a young sci-fi fan, the show I detested the most was SPACE:1999. Never did a show take so long to have nothing happen. Back then I didn’t expect much in the way of special effects (think Star Trek), but this was bad stuff to a young teenager. UGH!