Three more contenders:
The Gong Show
The Morton Downey Jr Show
Zoobilee Zoo
After “Afternoon Delight” dropped off the charts, the Starland Vocal Band had their own variety show. :eek: It lasted several episodes, and also featured David Letterman. Fortunately, he wasn’t well known enough at the time for it to destroy his career.
I think they still have them in Japan, but it is dead here in the US.
Was it really? I’ve never seen it. What made it so bad/depraved?
It was founded on false pretenses: The ostensible purpose of the show was to be a comedy, when in reality the purpose was to be near-pornography.
For some reason Sonny Tufts’ name was a bit of a joke during the 1960s. In one ep of “My Mother, the Car,” the plot all revolves around going to a drive-in movie in the Mother/Car to see a Sonny Tufts movie. I’ve never seen any of his stuff, personally, so I can’t say whether it was justified.
Remember American Idol? The reality show where the winner of a season-long singing contest won a for-real recording contract? No, I’m not nominating it. However, in its heyday, a competing show called Superstar USA sprung up. It billed itself as a straight-up knock off of American Idol: it had the same format with a lot of people performing a series of singing auditions in front of an audience, and the field would slowly be winnowed to a single winner.
What the contestants were not told is that the worst singers would be the ones who advanced. The show was a giant, soul-crushing prank, designed to build up the egos of people who just couldn’t admit that they were terrible singers, and then humiliate them on television.
There have been a lot of shows with outright bad premises. I truly hope that nothing ever comes close to being as cruel and heartless as this.
Too late. Wayyyy to late.
"De Grote Donorshow (The Big Donor Show) was a reality television program which was broadcast in the Netherlands on Friday, June 1, 2007, by BNN. The program involved a supposedly terminally ill 37-year-old woman donating a kidney to one of twenty-five people requiring a kidney transplantation. "
You do know about Queen for a Day, don’t you? There would be three to five women on the show each day. They would each talk about the terrible situation they were in. They would often desperately need some medical help for a member of their family, for instance. The studio audience would vote for which of them should get that help. The winner would get it (and a bunch of junk from the sponsors of the show which often would be useless to the winner). The remaining contestants would get a smaller amount of junk from the sponsors (but not the help that they needed) and would be quickly hustled off the stage:
Of the same caliber would be Donny and Marie.
You’re thinking of Newlyweds, which was awesome in a trainwreck kind of way. (“Is tuna chicken?”) nearwildheaven is talking about The Nick & Jessica Variety Hour, which is awful in every way.
To be fair, the Variety Hour was a single “event” special, along the lines of the Star Wars Christmas Special.
That’s actually a fair point, but it also makes me think that the more interesting question would be the worst show ever that got at least a second season.
I gave up on “Under the Dome” after about three episodes. Lost interest in “Wayward Pines” about halfway through season 1.
Aww. As a little kid, I loved the The Gong Show.
What? Suzanne Somers running around without a bra = near-porn??
As for my nomination, I suggest a reality show that was sort of a real-life Clue game, but with the contestants being picked off one by one. I can’t remember the name, but the idea sounded like it might of had potential, yet it was so hilariously bad as to make me give up at the start of the second episode. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
And then there’s You’re in the Picture, a show whose first episode was so bad that the host spent the second episode just apologizing for the first episode (and then the show was cancelled):
I think you can make an analogy to the epidemic of synthetic pot usage and overdoses because actual marijuana is made artificially scarce. People end up using a substance immeasurably worse as a substitute.
That’s impossible. It’s about time was set in prehistoric times and Gilligans Island was set in the present day on an island, duhh…
I’m not talking about their reality show, I am talking about their variety show, which only 35 minutes of the first hourlong episode was ever aired.
I won’t name a single particular show, but rather a genre- those shows detailing the lives of such people as dwarves, girls with two heads, and those unfortunates who are so obese they can’t move.
This was in the last few years, right? I remember talking about it on the SDMB and not getting too far in to it, either.
There was also a recent one called “Utopia” where a bunch of people had to live in a “walled-off” commune sort of place and basically build their own society from the ground up. Except it turns out that all people - even people vetted for reality tv - are awful and can’t possibly create a society, and it was just week after week of people screaming at each other and getting sent home for nearly killing each other. I don’t think it lasted a full season because the premise was shot after just a handful of episodes (the season wasn’t done being shot while it was being shown).
I’ve never seen an episode of My Mother the Car, but I agree with this anyway. People ridicule the premise, which was admittedly wacky. But was it really any stranger than the premises of, say, My Favorite Martian or I Dream of Jeannie? What makes a show good or bad is what they do with that premise–are the jokes good, are they performed well, is the writing fresh and interesting? As I say, I’ve never seen My Mother the Car, so I can’t judge it on that score. But the strange premise shouldn’t be enough to sink it in and of itself.
Sonny Tufts, for awhile, was a good go-to punchline–there’s at least one joke about him that I can recall on The Dick Van Dyke Show, as well. He had the perfect combination of having a funny-sounding name, and being a somewhat famous but not-very-good actor.
Speaking of wacky premises…
In threads like this, I like to mention Out of This World, another direct-to-syndication sitcom that aired around the same time as Small Wonder, and also managed to run for four seasons. It was about a teenage girl who was half-alien, and thus had superhuman abilities that she had to hide. Alas, rather than doing anything interesting with them, she used them to solve typical teen-sitcom problems like getting a date to the prom or covering up a little white lie, always in the most predictable way possible. Maybe because it lacked the inherent creepiness of the “robot daughter” premise, it doesn’t seem to be as well-remembered as Small Wonder, but I can assure you it was equally stilted and amateurish.
It may not be the worst TV show ever, but any discussion of the topic should include 2 Broke Girls. Kat Dennings continued career is proof that God is an angry and vengeful God.