No Budget / Live-Action TV

• A common trend with pilot episodes. They tend to be made on extremely limited budgets, with no one being paid in the most extreme cases. This often results in a noticeable increase in quality from the second episode on.
• USA Network tried to rescue Airwolf without accounting for the price tag. They had to use painfully obvious stock footage to cover up the fact that they didn't actually have the helicopter. They couldn't afford the actors, either.
• Animorphs had no budget whatsoever, and it shows, particularly when they're showing any sort of Andalite (not that they did this very often). It's just one of the many reasons most fans of the books hated it.
• New Zealand-produced TV show Back Of The Y made up for its ultra-low budget by taking pure Refuge in Audacity.
• Said to be the reason for the strange shape of sheets of paper in Battlestar Galactica (2003). When the pilot was made, they were apparently told to "cut every corner" as far as the budget went, and so cut the corners off the paper as a bit of a joke. Once the series was picked up and given rather more of a budget, the paper was subjected to Fridge Logic and just looks a bit silly, and a continuity nightmare for the props department.
• In general, this applied to many shows on The BBC in the 1960s-80s. As the Doctor Who YMMV page puts it: "The BBC was somewhat notorious for giving the set and costume designers of Doctor Who a shoestring budget; that is, a bundle of shoe strings that they were expected to make fifteen monsters out of." Tom Baker, who played the Fourth Doctor, claimed that nobody liked the bad effects the show had during this period and you just bore with them. Anyone who says otherwise is looking through the nostalgia-glasses.
  Stephen Fry: [holding bubble wrap] Look, erm, Vince, either the BBC believes in Doctor Who or it doesn't, but how am I going to make seventeen monsters out of this?
  • While not quite as bad as it was in the seventies, budget constraints occasionally hold the show back even today.
  • The most austere eras for Doctor Who were:
    • The very first season, where the BBC's unwillingness to risk too much on such an experimental show had caused it to be consigned to a tiny sound stage with minimal props;
    • the parts of the Tom Baker era produced during the 70s' "stagflation" recession and especially the parts produced during the "Winter of Discontent";
    • the period towards the mid-to-late 80s where the BBC's Controller Michael Grade cut the show's budget to purposefully unsustainable levels in an intent to kill it;
    • the first series of the 2005 revival, due to an initially tiny budget compounded by Russell T Davies not having ever budgeted a science fiction show before and blowing all of the money on the second episode.
  • One episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus had The BBC run out of money. The credits were written on scraps of paper, and the heat turned off in the flat they were renting as a studio. The "Mr Neutron Is Missing" episode ends with an announcer saying that the studio ran out of money, so instead of filming the ending, he's just going to tell everyone what would have happened in the final scenes. And then the episode ends before he could finish.
  • Fans of many BBC shows have a common saying that goes similar to "BBC: 15 ACTORS, 8 PROPS, 3 SHOOTING AREAS, AND ONE STORYLINE".
  • This persisted well into the eighties where children's programming was concerned. The Excited Kids' Show Host and their Non-Human Sidekick (usually The Voiceless, probably also to keep costs down) would actually have to do their thing in the booth where the Continuity Announcements were made, even having to personally press the button to cue up the next cartoon. This booth was nicknamed "The Broom Cupboard", and with good reason (most people old enough to remember this might have been surprised to learn that it wasn't an actual cupboard), which is probably why CBBC's presenters tended not to be quite as loud and hammy back then; there wasn't space.
• Belgian television is notorious for being very low-budget, which is why it turns a lot of people off. The highest viewer rating ever seen on Belgian TV however was 1,9 million, so it's not really unexpected. The biggest budget ever put in a Belgian television show was De Kavijaks with 3,35 million dollars. Even so, there are a few cases that stand out.
  • Maurice De Wilde spent all of the budget he got for his documentaries on research. He still produces spectacular television though if you consider Talking Heads to be spectacular. This was intentional however as he did not want to rely on special effects to tell what really happened, which makes all of his documentaries all the more informative.
  • 2013 is perhaps the only show in television history to be deliberately filmed with amateur cameras. In this case to give the impression that it is all really happening. It works though.
• Canadian television is somewhat infamous for being this, with typical budgets usually being about that of the cheapest American productions. The reasons for this are varied and complex, but can be largely summed up as being generally related to Canadian content laws and how small Canada's entertainment industry is compared to that of the States. The proximity between Canada and the States, as well as the fact Canadians tend to consume more American media than domestically-made media, makes this very noticeable for many on both sides of the border, hence the stereotype that all Canadian television is crap.
• Public-access television is this, seeing how the shows that broadcast here are produced and aired locally for free. With the rise of the internet during the mid 2000's public-access shows have begun to post their episodes on sites like YouTube following their TV airings.
  • Sprinkler's Clubhouse, which airs on Chandler Educational TV on channel 99 ^note  or at least if you're using Cox cable system , is mostly set against a flat 2D backdrop with low-quality puppets and stock audio; and that's not even getting to the green screen effects.
  • Then there's New York-based talent show Stairway to Stardom, which The A.V. Club once called "one of the greatest shows ever to be on television."
• Blake's 7 was allocated the same budget by the BBC as the much cheaper cop show it was replacing. The per-episode effects budget, for example, was £50. Expect to see plenty of sets, costumes, and props nicked from Doctor Who, or perhaps some baking tins stuck on the walls. The special effects designer spent his budget for the entire series on the first episode to be filmed, "Space Fall", because A New Hope was debuting at around the same time. The actual first episode, "The Way Back", went so far over budget it affected the rest of the season — and became one of the best stories in the series.
• COPS, which is "filmed on-location with the men and women of law enforcement," as it says at the beginning of every show. The show is completely unscripted, mostly because it follows real police officers making routine arrests and talking to people. What little budget there is goes into the cameras and editing.
• The first season of Double the Fist (8 episodes) was made for $250k, which is pretty impressive considering the amount of CGI effects used.
• The long-extinct DuMont network's programs were produced on low budgets due to their constant troubles as the perennial fourth place network. This resulted in shows with wobbly sets, improvised props (such as the "communicator" in Captain Video made out of a regular telephone handset) and a soundtrack provided by just an electric organ. To be fair, they often made up for these deficiencies with good writing and excellent actors.
• The Eric Andre Show is a parody of low-rent, DIY public access shows. To help make it look authentic, Adult Swim gave the creators $60 for the first season.
• The Show Within a Show on Garth Marenghis Darkplace suffers from this, being funded mostly out-of-pocket by Marenghi and Dean Learner. This leads to some epic Special Effect Failures such as a motorcycle chase done on bicycles with engine noised dubbed in. It's exaggerated considering the actual show does have a small but reasonable budget.
  Dean Learner: He had a very ambitious script. I said: "Garth, this is a very ambitious script for the money we've got. Seeing as we've got no money, it's extremely ambitious." We were filming it in my garage. I had a big garage, but still it was ambitious to film a TV show in a garage.
• Parodied in one episode of the Israeli sitcom HaPijamot featuring the same basic premise in various What If? scenarios. The last two were ‘The Story that Would Have Happened if We Had No Budget’, featuring the eponymous band replaced by work immigrants from China, and ‘The Story that Would Have Happened if We Had No Budget at All’, in which the apartment they live in was empty.
• One episode of Head of the Class had an In-Universe instance: Mr. Moore was directing Little Shop of Horrors as the School Play, for which he was given zero budget. He talks the principal into being in the show as Mr. Mushnick, then explains his concept for production. (Quote not guaranteed exact; we couldn't get someone to search it out.)
  Mr. Moore: You heard of Japanese Noh theatre? No sets, no costumes, no props. Because, you know... no money.
• The novel I, Claudius, and its sequel, were big sprawling epics, with a few large battles, lots and lots of circuses and gladiatorial games, and the occasional riot. The TV adaptation manages to stage the whole thing without ever having a crowd larger than a meeting of the Roman Senate. (The battles all occur off-camera, with perhaps an aftermath scene in the general's tent; the gladiatorial games consist of a close-up camera on the Emperor's box.) Hey, the BBC ain't made of money.
• The pilot episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was reportedly shot for $200, but Charlie Day has said they he has no idea where the number came from as there was no actual working budget at all.
  • In a way the first season (and to a lesser extent the second season) were this for the series. The first season had a budget of roughly $400,000 an episode, when Danny Devito joined in season two the budget roughly doubled, and later seasons are closer to $1.5 million an episode.
• The 1991 Soviet adaptation of Lord of the Rings dug up in 2021 is this trope incarnate. It's effectively a stage show broadcast as a movie (Russian has a special name for that type of work; telespectacl' - a TV stage play), with things like Gandalf's fireworks represented by him opening his cloak and some brief colored flashes. That and other things are why some people call it an adaptation of the situation before the end of the Cold War as much as one of Tolkien.
• The Late Late Show: Although this is commonly joked about, Craig Ferguson has said in interviews that the reason they rarely do sketches is a lack of money for props. The show only purchased one puppet and got the rest for free from the company who made them, and when the show went to Paris, they couldn't afford to rent a studio (although this resulted in charming scenes of him and Kristen Bell wondering around Paris landmarks interviewing guests on the move). It got a little bit better when Ferguson's new contract with the accompanying new larger studio kicked in, though new no budget items such as the 'fireplace' with a still of a fire keep the show's cheap charm strong.
• M.A.N.T.I.S. didn't have much of a budget and it showed, featuring frequent use of old footage, including footage from the original TV movie and ended with the hero and his Love Interest killed while trying to stop an invisible dinosaur.
• Miami Vice: By the time the fifth and final season rolled around, the production budget had been significantly cut due to dwindling ratings (caused by a disastrous shift to Sunday evenings after seeing great ratings on its original Friday night slot). As a result, it became increasingly-clear that the show was on its way out. The show had already hit a snag going into production when a writers' strike chopped down the number of episodes from 22 to 21, and it became clear that the season would be its last^note NBC initially only agreed to produce 13 episodes, but were eventually convinced to produce a full-season.. Showrunner Dick Wolf and composer Jan Hammer left, replaced by new composer Tim Truman and existing producers Robert Ward and Richard Brams (Michael Mann is still credited as an executive producer, but had no real involvement in the series by that point). The episodes had more in common with stage plays, with few-to-no extras in many scenes, scripts were rehashed from previous episodes, cast members were intermittently missing in various episodes (Crockett often appears at the very beginning of an episode and disappears for the remainder, likely a consequence of lowered salaries) and an attempt to make a Poorly Disguised Pilot (following a group of younger Vice cops separate from Sonny and Ricardo) went nowhere. By the time the series finale rolled around, the climactic battles took place beside busy freeways in full view of the cameras — a consequence of lowered production budgets leading to smaller sets.
• The Mighty Boosh runs on a notoriously small budget, and as the show progressed the BBC actually cut the budget smaller and smaller as the poor quality of the costumes and sets only served to make the show funnier. During one early episode, Vince draws attention to some serious Special Effect Failure and Howard quips "we spent the budget on your hair".
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 started with a tiny budget on its first (KTMA) season, which is what spawned its very homemade-looking props. Subsequent seasons actually had a decent budget, but they had to spend most of it on film rights, so the host segments continued to look very homemade.
• Early public access producer Paper Tiger Television used any camera they could get ahold of, often shooting shows in both color and black and white. Cameramen would also be shown in shots to show the community aspect of the programming. These shooting techniques were copied endlessly by outfits that did have a budget, including MTV for much of the 1990s.
• PJ Katie's Farm is defined by its utter lack of budget. Everything is done by the eponymous PJ Katie — the characters were made by her out of Crayola Model Magic, there are no writers (the scripts are all ad-libbed by PJ Katie), there is only one voice actor and she is the same person as the puppeteer. The only other person on set was the cameraman. At one point a danish, which was obviously PJ Katie's lunch, was used as a prop to represent a flying saucer and you can see her eating it during the credits.
• The two Power Rangers Super Samurai holiday specials "Trickster Treat" and "Stuck on Christmas" were done last-minute, allegedly due to a previously overlooked contractual obligation with Nickelodeon. With production of the series having already wrapped and the production of Power Rangers Megaforce set to begin soon, those two episodes were made on a very low budget, with Stock Footage running rampant. "Stuck on Christmas" mostly averts this by being a mixture of a Bottle Episode and a clip show, though it only includes a few secondary characters actually onscreen, with the main actors dubbing over original zord cockpit footage (and stock footage); however, "Trickster Treat" was almost entirely made up of stock footage, mostly from the Samurai Sentai Shinkenger Direct to Video movie, unmorphed footage from previous episodes and some from an upcoming episode. Whatever little budget was available was spent on dubbing over the stock footage and editing the episodes.
  • The original pilot version of the first episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, "Day of the Dumpster", was obviously produced on a low budget, with cheaper-looking sets and primitive special effects. In addition, the U.S. footage was shot on videotape rather than on film as with the series, making for a huge contrast between the U.S.-shot footage and the Super Sentai footage.
• ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?: The show was made with a grant from the federal government for shows about minorities. Government money meant a very tight budget. When the grant ran out, so did the show.
  • The cast and crew forfeited their rights to royalties so that the show would remain free for educational purposes.
  • With no budget for sets, the executive producer used his personal belongings and shopped at thrift stores to decorate the Peña home.
• Red Dwarf was deliberately written and designed to be as cheap as possible before they started scrimping on models (the first Starbug was made out of a discarded lawnmower).
• Roundhouse functioned on a very small budget. It used recycled actors, about two boxes' worth of props (mostly cardboard), and two "sets" that were just wheelable walls loaded with random stuff that was probably bought from a garage sale. The only impressive thing they had was their motorized recliner. The simple "improv" look, combined with their humor, singing, and dancing skills, was a good deal of their charm.
• Rutland Weekend Television was notorious for this, as they were given a far smaller budget than intended. ("We were given a shoestring budget, and someone else was wearing the shoe.") Lampshaded, often—they even got a cheap song about it, once!
  Host: Hello, and welcome to Rutland Weekend Television. We've got a really great show lined up for you... not that you can tell, mind you. I mean, for instance... look at this suit. It's rubbish! Feel the quality of that, hm? It's not even theirs! Everything's hired.
• Nearly every show by Sid and Marty Krofft Productions was produced on a budget far lower than what the duo would asked from the networks. However these setbacks only added to the bizarre and drug-induced charm of their shows, seeing as how they went on to dominate ^note for live-action that is the Saturday morning TV market during the late 60s and early 70s.
• Space Cases was a sci-fi show filmed on almost no budget (it was both a cable show and a kid's show, two strikes against it money-wise). Aside from putting CDs on the sides of chairs and handheld video games for control panels, they had the one advantage of being on Nickelodeon: recycling props, most notably from Are You Afraid of the Dark?. Fans tend to agree that this adds to its charm.
• The early 1970s science-fiction series The Starlost didn't have much of a budget to begin with, and most of it was blown trying to get a fancy special-effects camera to work. Most of the sets and special effects are terrible as a result.
• This is among the many things spoofed by the Stargate SG-1 episode "Wormhole X-Treme!". The guy playing Jack O'Neill's expy asks Martin what color the beam from his blaster is. Martin tells him they can't afford a beam; they're just using sound effects.
• Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad: Low budget might as well be an excuse for reusing battle scenes with as much regularity as that show did. Also, there were a grand total of five sets (School cafeteria, school hallway, Sam's room, Malcolm's room, newsdesk.) Anything not in those locations is Gridman footage, right down to the overwhelmingly-black-haired factory workers and such, if the monster affects the outside world before it impacts anyone we know.
  • Sadly, that is nothing compared to its sister series Cake. Despite the advantages of airing on an actual network (CBS) rather than syndication and being a US-produced series which did not require purchasing/dubbing stock footage, the show somehow ended up with less than half of even Syber-Squad's budget resulting in only four actors^note For context, Syber-Squad's opening credits bill nine human actors and one voice actor. and three sets^note Cake's backyard, garage, and Grandma Cyrstal's trailer. being used for all 13 episodes (compared to 53 for Syber-Squad).
• Like most shows of the 1930s, The Television Ghost was filmed extremely cheaply, with one actor monologuing at a camera for fifteen minutes.
• Top Gear has episodes where presenters have to buy cars for a very low price, e.g. Porsches below £1500 or vans below £1000.
• Ultraman Ginga came at a time when Tsuburaya Productions had just lost an expensive legal battle, yet decided to splurge what money they did have on a miniseries for an Ultra Series Milestone Celebration. The series was set in an abandoned school and a nearby forest area, and the plot involved Ultramen and kaiju being turned into dolls so as to make use of Off-the-Shelf FX with the existing Ultraman toyline. It ended up doing well enough to help Tsuburaya pay off their debts and greenlight a second season for Ginga with a bigger budget, and then invest in further Ultraman series afterward.
• V (1983): The two mini-series shared impressive visuals, but for the TV series the quality plummeted. Sometimes this was rationalized in script; Diana elaborately explained the "improved" human food processing that is now just a guy standing on a platform. Sometimes the differences are ignored; The brainwashing process changes from an elaborate laser-and-smoke show to seating the human in front of some big TV screens. And in one case, a direct continuity error; In the mini series, the visitors can't pass for human because of a noticeable voice effect that was important to the plot. (The humans learn to simulate it.) In the regular series, the effect is forgotten about, and a visitor gets a girlfriend who thinks he is human.

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