Hee Haw Honeys (Kathie Lee Gifford’s only sitcom in which she was a regular, IIRC)
Down to Earth (originally just on WTBS, but it was a series)
No Ordinary Family (like Terra Nova, this had an excellent premise that was ruined by making it a family drama with a gimmick)
I think Jerry played Dick’s dumb brother in one episode - My Mother the Car shows this was actually true in real life.
Little known fact - Jerry had a cameo in Mary Poppins - as soot.
There are a lot. But the one that popped into my head first is Jerseylicious. I watched it because its filmed pretty close to here and I knew someone who was in the cast. Even with that I couldn’t get through an episode.
I’ll go with three hated shows of my youth:
By the way, I’ve seen episodes of The Trouble with Tracy, a legendarily bad TV show, but I didn’t mind it that much.
Ugh, yeah, that’s it. Jeez, everything from Sid and Marty Krofft should be on the list (Far Out Space Nuts? HR Pufnstuff? The Bugaloos?).
I actually watched an episode of Cavemen, yep, the one with the cavemen from the insurance commercial. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen. It’s driving all other bad shows out of my mind at the moment.
Jerry Van Dyke appeared as Dick’s banjo-playing brother on more than one episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. He much later had a regular role on Coach.
There was one, after “Car 54 Where Are You”, called “It’s About Time” (I can still hear the theme song in my ear). It starred Joe E Ross (another candidate for the thread about performers with middle initials) as a caveman; I think Imogene Coca was his wife. It actually aired 26 episodes (one full season, in those days). I’m not sure how many I watched, but it sings through history as one of the worst wastes of time (at least before reality TV) ever broadcast.
Here’s the pilot, complete with dinosaurs and cavemen existing at the same time, for those who have nothing better to do.
Roddy
- My Mother the Car
- Manimal
- Cavemen
I am not certain that Cavemen actually existed in real life or whether I just had a very long nightmare.
Interesting thing about that series – partway through it changed from “Mack and Heck the astronauts stuck in the prehistoric past” into “Mack and Heck bring back the stoneage family (Joe E Ross, Imogene Coca, and the Pretty Daughter) to the present”. Lower production costs, I guess. And they didn’t have to pay to use the old clips of dinosaurs from the movie Dinosaurus anymore.
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Martin, starring Martin Lawrence. A sitcom that was on for a number of years, is still playing in reruns on BET or its equivalent, without ever being funny ONCE.
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The Suite Life of Zack & Cody/The Suite Life on Deck. Disney Channel’s dreckiest alleged sitcom, which I was forced to watch while baby-sitting. It made Saved by the Bell look like Masterpiece Theatre.
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I don’t know. I’ve watched a lot a lousy TV, but I’ve blocked most of it from my memory.
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Out of the Blue- a truly awful spinoff of Happy Days (sorta kinda- same producers and they worked the lead character into an episode) about an angel who takes care of some orphans left with their aunt, a pre-Designing Women Dixie Carter
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Tyler Perry’s House of Payne- one of the only sitcoms that I cannot even have on in the house; assemble any 5 people and I absolutely guarantee you they could make up a sitcom as they went along and do it better than this crap. Makes the Madea movies look like ‘The Best of Carol Burnett’.
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Gomer Pyle- I was thinking of this when Jim Nabors was in the news recently for his Li’l Gay Weddin’- for a long running show this was one of the lamest things ever on TV. A Marine in the late '60s never gets sent even to another base (let alone Vietnam) and if a member of his barracks says something about a girl’s slip it’s considered racy. Sets that would embarrass Gary Marshall (who I love as a performer but hate as a producer) and plots so simple you could understand just fine if you were watching the Swedish or Hindi dubbed version. Take the folksiest lamest version of post-Barney Andy Griffith Show and run it for six years.
Ok, for the other two I’d have to say Cop Rock and Out of this World, which I had to look up but I knew it as the one that played before Small Wonder. Small Wonder was genius next to this.
Anyone else remember something called Detective School, with a post- Emergency! Randy Mantooth? It was allegedly to be a comedy.
- Small Wonder
- Out of This World
- Big Bang Theory
The Walking Dead - A genre that’s already been milked to death before the first episode aired, a mediocre cast portraying a bunch of underdeveloped characters with murky motivations, aimless episodes and half-baked storylines, lots and lots and lots and lots of dull staring off into space as the producers desperately stall for time between the big set-pieces. This show basically seems like a zombie - a soul-less husk mindlessly lurching along, with no goal or direction, inexplicably, into nowhere.
It kind of burns me up that a great, smart show like Enlightened gets axed, while garbage like this breaks all kinds of ratings records.
This, most certainly!
Maury Povich - I had the misfortune of seeing this when my spousal unit was home recuperating from surgery and for some unknown reason (I suspect the painkillers he was taking) he actually enjoyed watching this show.
The Nanny. My ears bleed just to think of it.
I know “Manimal” gets kicked around a lot on lists like this, but it’s funny – I actually remember liking it when it was on. I was 12 at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s horrible – it’s just interesting to remember that my taste wasn’t always as impeccable as it is now. 
My contributions:
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Monty, which was a short-lived show in which Henry Winkler played a conservative talk-show house. Terrible.
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Madman of the People – Dabney Coleman was excellent in Buffalo Bill, and pretty good in Slap Maxwell, but he went downhill fast after that.
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Woops!, a post-apocalyptic sitcom.
Trivia: Joe E Ross was a “blue comic” before and after Car 54 and was one of the most hated co-stars of all time on both of his shows. Charlotte Rae referred to him only as “that dreadful man” in the commentary on Car 54 and Fred Gwynne refused to be in the same room with him when they weren’t shooting; had Car 54 lasted another year he would not have been on it. Andy Kaufman somehow encountered him a couple of times (I don’t know if they performed the same venue or Kaufman just saw him perform) and Ross was one of the inspirations for Kaufman’s Tony Clifton. (Ross’s bringing unattractive prostitutes to the set was worked into Kaufman’s Clifton schtick.)
Happy Days only in the sense that Mork and Mindy was a spinoff of that series. Robin Williams guested in the pilot and, like the rest of the show, was painfully unfunny. David Brenner played the angel (“Random”) and was even worse. Mork and Random were apparently cosmic buddies of some sort, but the guest shot was obviously an attempt to liven up a lame series and win ratings.
I remember watching that episode and wanting to fling my television set off my balcony afterwards.