Mystery Science Theater 3000 refused to re-air KTMA episodes after they left that station and requested Comedy Central cease airing Season 1 episodes shortly before Season 4. While some of these (especially the KTMA eps) had to do with the legal issues surrounding the movies in use that has plagued the series to this day, they admitted to this very trope in the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, likening it to becoming a famous writer and then having an old classmate publish one of your shameful high school works. It's worth noting that several movies from the KTMA era were reused (with the rights properly attained this time around), essentially giving Best Brains a chance for a do-over.
Now that the franchise is dead, gone, and crystallized as a cult classic, series owner Jim Mallon has become a lot more liberal about putting KTMA snippets on the MST3K website and official DVD releases, likely because the odds of it doing any harm to the show's rep are minimum and fans are quite fascinated by them. Similarly, no prejudice is held against season one episodes when it comes to the DVDs and about half the episodes have been released.
In Brazil, famous children's television hostess Xuxa tried at all costs to retrieve old pornographic material involving her, which is understandable. After the advent of the internet, Xuxa successfully sued a big auction website to stop sales of a soft-porn movie with her, as well as a widely-circulated newspaper for showing a half-naked picture of her.note Of course, thanks to the Streisand Effect...
This post from Jack Coleman of Heroes, aka Noah Bennett, may utterly define this Trope.
Sarah Michelle Gellar would like to burn all the tapes from Girl Talk, a show she did when she was little.
In several episodes of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart refers to his previous film career in this manner. He seems particularly regretful over Death to Smoochy, as he said in his opening speech at the Oscars:
"Tonight is the night when we celebrate excellence in film - with me, the fourth male lead from Death to Smoochy."
One episode of the Japanese TV series Ultra Seven featured Monsters of the Week who resembled atomic bomb radiation victims, complete with scars and welts. Their plot was to suck blood from women and children in order to rejuvenate their polluted bodies. In the only country in the world to have nuclear weapons used on it, this sparked an obvious backlash (especially from real radiation victims, who were already suffering severe discrimination). Similar to the Pokémon incident above, the producers' reaction was to strike the episode from the canon and act like it never existed.
As well as numerous continuity issues, such as the Death Glider carrying a set of transportation rings when cargo ships served this purpose throughout the rest of the series.
Bob Saget feels this way about his family-friendly roles in the late 1980s and early 1990s on Full House and America's Funniest Home Videos. He has since cultivated an image as an edgy, dark comic and has made a career out of Adam Westing his previous family-friendly persona by portraying a fictionalized version of himself that is drug abusing, foul-mouthed and sexually deviant in his stand-up.
Brannon Braga, writer of the infamous Star Trek: Voyager episode "Threshold", acknowledges it to probably be the worst Trek episode he ever wrote, referring to it as a "royal steaming stinker", though he was quick to point out that he'd also written over 100 Trek episodes and could be forgiven just one bomb. Despite this, the episode won an Emmy...for makeup. Braga had previously written and co-written some of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (such as "Reunion", "Birthright Part 1", "Frame of Mind", and "All Good Things"), so it wasn't a trend.
Ira Steven Behr is responsible for many of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's best-loved episodes, but also some of its most-reviled episodes. Of the episode "Meridian" in particular (essentially BrigadoonIN SPACE!), he later said, "I am a moron."
From the same series: Chase Masterson, who played the busty dabo girl Leeta, recalled meeting the show's star for the first time and repeatedly being addressed as "Kathy." It wasn't until she finally corrected him that Avery Brooks cited her virtuoso performance as "Kathy" in... an infomercial for a treadmill exercise machine.
Tina Louise, given how she feels about Gilligan's Island and her role as Ginger.
The Star Wars Holiday Special, a quick exploitation TV one-off produced a year after the original movie was released. George Lucas has gone on record to say he would hunt down and destroy every last copy of the Special if he had the time and money, and virtually every actor who appeared in it (most notably Harrison Ford), just about refuses to admit it exists.
While this show has been around a long time and fans have differing opinions on what seasons are considered good or bad, there is one thing Saturday Night Live fans can agree on: Season 6 (the 1980-81 season spearheaded by Jean Doumanian) was generally bad. So much so that, outside of a 60-minute Comedy Central rerun and a full 90-minute rerun on NBC, Season 6 hasn't aired in full anywhere in America, except for when it premiered in the early 1980s (Canada, on the other hand, did air all the episodes from Season 6) and it's highly unlikely that the episodes will be released on DVD now that Seasons 1-5 are out.
Season 11 (1985-86) also qualifies as an Old Shame, at least to current Simpsons writer George Meyer, ex-Simpsons writer Jon Vitti, and NBC executives, who referred to the entire season as a "horrible, horrible dream" at the beginning of Season 12.
Season 20 (1994-95) could be considered this in the eyes of Janeane Garofalo, who left mid-season after putting up with the "unfair boys' club" attitude of the cast and writers (in a comedy special, she compared being on SNL as being the Indian who gets the smallpox-ridden blanket from the white settlers) and Lorne Michaels (who cites the season as the closest he's ever been to being fired and having his show canceled).
All this said, you can watch the above seasons and all the other ones on Netflix, if you're so inclined. Unfortunately, the episodes are heavily edited, and some run less than 30 minutes.
ABC Family really doesn't want to be reminded they have to continue giving Pat Robertson and his 700 Club three hours a day on their network, along with one day in January for his yearly CBN telethon, just because some underling of Rupert Murdoch couldn't persuade him to give up the network completely. The network airs the show very reluctantly, putting disclaimers on before it stating that they don't support Robertson's views and refusing to put up anything identifying the channel as ABC Family.
This said, keeping "Family" in the title forever and guaranteeing himself airtime were smart moves by Robertson. Say what you will about his sometimes-controversial views, but he made damn sure that whoever owns the network he created will have to acknowledge its origins.
Why not just shut down the channel and debut a new channel with the exact same programing, slightly altered in times, on the same day? (This was, in fact, ABC's original intention, namely to rebrand the then-Fox Family as an ABC rerun farm and young-adult channel called XYZ. However, when they saw Robertson's contract stipulations were iron-clad, they realized the only way to break them was to completely start over and build XYZ from the ground up, which would put them in the very bad position having every single contract they have null and void and having to renegotiate with every cable system to get back on, which for any basic cable network would be a disastrous proposition.)
Evangeline Lilly of LOST once did a phone-sex commercial.
Disney and Power Rangers. The cheesy, bright kids show franchise was part of the package when they bought up Fox's kids programming and The Family Channel, and they clearly never were proud of it, to the point that they had no real problem eventually selling it back to Haim Saban and Shuki Levy.
Interestingly, despite its Loads and Loads of Characters, there are very few actors who actively treat it as such. Danny Slavin is the biggest case; he only took the job to pay for law school and doesn't even think about it since. Others have had shame for it but most have come around to some degree, like Steve Cardenas (who originally refused to even mention it, but has since warmed up to it), David Yost (who didn't hate the show, but was understandably upset about getting gay-bashed behind the scenes) and Amy Jo Johnson, who is a pretty odd case (She doesn't seem to hate the show, but instead hated the typecasting afterwards. She'll be civil to fans who mention it, but generally doesn't like to bring it up. She's later mentioned that the reason she doesn't go to conventions or fan events is not because of disliking her role, but mostly because of getting freaked out in huge crowds and also not wanting to risk stalkers.) Considering the number of Ranger actors currently sits around 90, and growing each year, the fact that Slavin seems to be the only real case of Old Shame is pretty damn impressive.
Slavin's case is interesting; as detailed on Lost Galaxy's page there was a lot of Executive Meddling (especially for the team-up episode with Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue) that understandably rubbed him the wrong way. Initially Slavin refused to return for the 10th anniversary episode "Forever Red", but changed his mind at the last minute as a favor to the producers. After this, though, he effectively retired from acting and has turned down numerous invites to Power Morphicon.
In light of all this, the news that Slavin agreed to reprise the role of Leo for Power Rangers Super Megaforce was especially surprising.
it may be that the Red Galaxy Ranger suit is just cursed. The actor who played Ginga Red (the Super Sentai counterpart to Slavin's character) Kazuki Maehara seems to feel the same about the role. He is also retired from acting and like Slavin he refused to appear in the Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger tribute episode to Gingaman, and only showed up when the cast and crew begged him to appear. As a result, he only shows up late in the episode. He seems to have gotten over it since, after the last episode of Gokaiger, he tweeted in-character as Ryouma that his ranger key had been returned to him.
Apparently, just about every one of the live actors involved with ALF, mainly since the puppet was treated better than the actors (the numerous trapdoors that they would use were time-consuming to reset, which gave the option of either exhausting your actors, or risking their safety by leaving them open.) So much, that after the final scene of the final episode was shot, actor Max Wright simply walked to his car, drove off, and never spoke to any of the cast members ever again.
For what it's worth, even Wright seems to have softened a bit over time; in 2006, he was quoted as saying "It doesn't matter what I felt or what the days were like, ALF brought people a lot of joy."
Despite many fans who remember him in this role from the 1970s, Morgan Freeman prefers not to talk about his time as Easy Reader on The Electric Company or about being on that show in general. This didn't stop the Golden Globes for airing this before Freeman came up to get his DeMille award.
CBS seems to try to ignore the existence of the first season of Big Brother as much as possible, to the point of actually asking contestants in later seasons to not discuss it while on the show.
Interestingly enough, this was the only season that was close to the original (and wasn't as dependent on gimmicks as later seasons were).
Contrary to many rumors, Joe Odagiri doesn't directly hate talking about his stint as Kamen Rider Kuuga, but he has stated that he'd like to move forward as a more serious actor.
Seems to be the case with Dustin Diamond and Saved by the Bell. When the cast did a reunion for a magazine shoot sometime in early 2011, he was the only one who didn't participate (even Principal Belding was there) and instead released a book bashing the show. In an interview with TV Guide, Tiffani Amber-Thiessen said she thought this might have just been anger since he wasn't doing anything major at the moment, while the rest of the cast (except Lark Voorhies also), were.
One of Peter Davison's (aka The Fifth Doctor) early jobs was a guest shot on The Tomorrow People, an episode known as "A Man For Emily." Let's just say it opens with a nearly nude Peter sagging in manacles against a wall and goes downhill from there. Peter expressed utter horror upon learning that the episode had actually been broadcast in the US.
To the shock of many Doctor Who fans, Douglas Adams viewed the unfinished but legendary Doctor Who story "Shada" as this, publicly stating that he'd only signed the release to allow the 1992 VHS issue of what was made to go ahead because he hadn't noticed that it had been included in a folder with a bunch of other routine paperwork.
The Drew Carey Show may have lampshaded this during a live episode, where the kid that played Pinocchio showed up in costume and asks how come he never wants to hang out with him anymore.
Speaking of Whose Line, performers Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie have said they don't watch their earliest appearances on the British edition because of how awkward and unfunny they were.
MTV prefers not to acknowledge the existence of The Brothers Grunt, due to the horrible reviews and ratings the show had (MTV viewers even started a campaign to get the show canceled). The only people that seem to remember it are fans of creator Danny Antonucci (who also did Lupo The Butcher and Ed Edd N Eddy).
In a 1989 "decade in review" special MTV News named The Monkees as "most unnecessary comeback" of the 80s, despite the fact that it was MTV's airing of the sitcom's reruns that led to the Monkees' comeback in the first place.
America's Funniest Home Videos has pretty much disowned the time from 1998 to 1999 that John Fugelsang and Daisy Fuentes hosted it (and brought it to just this side of cancellation before it became a "special" show with rotating hosts before returning to form with Tom Bergeron). This disownment is evidenced by a retrospective episode of the Bergeron era, which brought back Saget but didn't even mention Fugelsang.
Vanna White of Wheel of Fortune fame starred in a 1988 TV movie for NBC called Goddess of Love. When Wheel host Pat Sajak brought it up on an episode, Vanna just about physically tried to stop him from saying any more about it.
Drake doesn't like to talk about his days as Jimmy (or to some people, that black kid in a wheelchair) on Degrassi. This is a weird version of this trope of him, since that's pretty much the only thing he's known for other than rapping. When he was on MTV's When I Was 17, he didn't discuss it at all even though, again, Degrassi was the only notable thing he did when he was 17.
His work is primarily distributed in the U.S., where Degrassi is far less popular than it is in his native Canada. It's actually quite understandable that he wouldn't bring it up given how his success as a rapper has largely overshadowed his acting career.
Some performers are fine with their work for Sid and Marty Krofft Productions being brought up. And then there are Deidre Hall (ElectraWoman and DynaGirl) and Jim Nabors (The Lost Saucer)...
Ellen DeGeneres has several segments on her show that highlight the old shames of audience members, notably "bad paid-for photos" and "hot glam, girl!" featuring embarrassing studio photographs and glamour shots, usually taken in the 80s and early 90s.
Not only did Martin Shaw hate Lewis Collins, his co-star on The Professionals (and vice versa), he also hated the show itself to the extent of blocking repeats for years (he later relented upon learning that the widow of the late Gordon Jackson (who played their boss) was having money troubles; the series has subsequently been shown frequently on British cable television).
FOX celebrated its 25th Anniversary in April 2012, which doesn't seem too out-of-place except for the fact the network actually debuted six months earlier (October 9, 1986) with The Late Show starring Joan Rivers. Okay, so the show had a rather tumultuous history until it was canned in mid-1988, but ignoring the first six months of your network to establish a "fake" start date falls squarely into here.
However, only the O&O's actually tried to promote that show, while the network struggled to string enough affiliates between October 1986 and April 1987 to get the network going before the primetime launch. There were even cases where seeing the iceberg ahead, some stations like WCGV in Milwaukee would only affiliate with the network if they didn't have to air The Late Show. Desperate to have as many affiliates as possible when the network launched in primetime, Fox allowed stations to avoid carrying it. Most sources thus call April 1987 the actual start of the network, and regard The Late Show as a Fox syndicated production instead before then.
When you star in a TV series that has your name in the title - for the sake of argument, let's call it David Cassidy: Man Undercover - and you still don't discuss it in your autobiography... yeah, shame of oldness.
Nickelodeon has tried to deny the existence of Cry Baby Lane in the past, a movie that was banned due to its terrifying content.
In-universe example in Castle; one of the things that intrigues the titular author about his copycat killer in the pilot is that the killer has chosen to base his crimes on Castle's self-described "truly lesser works." He is also able to peg Detective Beckett as a Fangirl of his because she is incredibly familiar with said lesser works:
Castle:Hell Hath No Fury? Angry wiccans out for blood? Come on — only hardcore Castle groupies read that one.
Detective Beckett also turns out to have one — apparently, when she was seventeen, she did some modelling for a sports store catalogue. She is appropriately mortified when her colleagues figure it out and get the pictures from her dad.
In "The Final Frontier", this trope actually leads to the murder: The actress who played Lt. Chloe on the short-lived Nebula 9 hated the show so much that when she found out that the woman who owned the rights to it was selling them to a major film company so it could possibly remake the series, she killed her before she could finalize the deal.
Thus far seemingly averted by Hayden Panettiere, who admitted at 2012's London Film And Comic Con that while she's appeared in some things that didn't turn out the way she hoped (she didn't say what things, however), she hasn't done anything she's truly regretted... in her day job, that is. For her Old Shame, see the Music folder.
Teri Garr guest starred as Roberta Lincoln in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode/Poorly Disguised Pilot "Assignment: Earth". She had a very uncomfortable time during filming (which included sexual harassment), to the point that she refuses to discuss Star Trek in any way and does not attend Star Trek conventions.
Kirk Cameron really feels bad about getting Growing Pains castmember Julie McCullough fired for posing for Playboy due to his religious views, as well as the controversy surrounding it, which he blames on lack of maturity.
Everyone on the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation feels this way about S1 E4 (also known as "Code of Honor"), an episode so charged with racial stereotypes and Unfortunate Implications and outright racism that it's kind of hard to watch. The plot is that there is a planet of aliens who look exactly like humans of African descent and dress in a mix of stereotype of what Shaka's warriors might wear and leopard-skin hot pants. This would be bad enough. However, the leader of these tribes is a somewhat sexist man who falls for blond-haired Lt. Yar, kidnaps her, and tries to get his "number one wife" killed via a duel with Yar. Their society actually follows tribal-style concepts of status and honor, including a "counting coup." And the Enterprise crew can't simply decide to have no part in any of this nonsense because the people of this planet have a vaccine which is vital to the survival of another planet, but are so wrapped up in their contests of honor that they will not release it until the Enterprise crew plays along. So you have African stereotypes kidnapping a pretty white woman to marry her, necessitating the pretty white woman's companions to try to save her while she has to fight an enraged, jealous African female. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?
For what it's worth, the aliens weren't written to be black in the script. The original director insisted on casting them this way, and proceeded to show himself to be such a horrible racist that he was quickly replaced.
Denis Leary admitted that he made a big mistake by arguing with Greg Giraldo on Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn.
Larry Hagman admitted to disliking the Dallas reunion movies, as did Patrick Duffy.
One of David Letterman's first tv roles was on "The Starland Vocal Band Show", an embarrasingly bad show made to cash in on the success of the band. Reportedly Letterman (as well as the SVB for that matter) left the show off his resume.
Mark Goodson, the man behind many famous game show formats, once called his 1954 game What's Going On? his worst. The show involved celebrities doing an activity from the live remote while the panel tried to guess the activity. It lasted only five episodes and was greatly hampered by the still-developing camera technology of the 1950s.
Tom Kennedy's first game show was Big Game, which aired for about 20 episodes in 1958. It was a bit like a mini-version of Battleship, but with questions and a hunting theme. Oh, and Kennedy wore a pith helmet. Decades later, after watching the one existing episode, Tom said he was "absolutely pitiful".
Gene Rayburn declared an embargo on his version of Break The Bank (he wasn't happy with his performance and the behind-the-scenes issues), and may have had a hand in disallowing The Match Game Hollywood Squares Hour from being shown again (announcer Gene Wood reportedly said that Rayburn was "dragged kicking and screaming" into the Hour and disliked working with co-host Jon Bauman).
Now You See It: Los Angeles news personality Chuck Henry specifically requested that GSN never rerun the 1989 version, which he hosted, because he thinks it'll damage his reputation as a news anchor. (Although really, what more damage could it do than the time he had to be rescued while reporting on a forest fire?)
The Price Is Right: Fur coats (and, in at least five instances, live dogs) used to be offered as prizes. Obviously, this was long before Bob Barker became an animal-rights activist, and per his wishes none of the fur coat episodes were ever rerun. note (...At least not intentionally; GSN accidentally aired three episodes with a fur in them {November 16, 1972; 1977; 1980}, which Barker graciously allowed to slide.)
Among the fur-containing episodes are the first three episodes ever taped, the last of which went unaired (and got replaced six days later) due to an ineligible contestant. BCI, which wanted to put the whole first week on the DVD set, offered to donate to Barker's favorite charities and/or put a disclaimer before the offending shows. Barker declined.
Dennis James' five years (1972-77) as host of the nighttime version, which frequently offered fur coats. That would be fine, if the remainder that could be legally aired hadn't been shunned by GSN at the same time they were doing "Game of the Week" during the Sunday Night In Black And White block. Only one James episode was aired by the network, and then only twice — a daytime show (December 25, 1974) where he filled-in for Barker, which pretty much amounts to a "pity airing" since it followed James' death in 1997. Further compounding matters is that his involvement with Price predates that of CBS, which in turn predates that of Barker (who initially wanted nothing to do with it).
Notably, Price itself finally acknowledged Dennis by posting clips of a nighttime episode (specifically, a lady winning a Showcase with an airplane in early 1976) to their official YouTube page in September 2012.
The one episode of You're In The Picture that aired on January 20, 1961 was so horrible that a week later, its timeslot was filled by host Jackie Gleason on an empty stage apologizing for how horrible it was. Ironically, the apology was far more well-received than the original show was, and led to Gleason doing a one-on-one talk show format called The Jackie Gleason Show.
Art James hosted a show called Blank Check from January-July 1975, which he and the staff called "Blank Mind" because they thought it was an overly-simple number-guessing game with no skill, designed to cash in on the ESP craze at the time. (One wonders what he would've thought of Deal or No Deal, since at least Blank Check had on-the-buzzer questions...)
One of Regis Philbin's first TV shows was The Neighbors, a lame The Newlywed Game knockoff which asked gossip questions of (always female) neighbors. The A&E Biography on Regis failed to mention it, and Regis was none too thrilled when Alex Trebek brought it up on an episode of Live With Regis And Kelly.
Although he isn't known to have said it in-show and hosted it with the same avuncular nature he gave all of his other work, Bill Cullen thought his short-lived game Winning Streak "just didn't work".
Bob Eubanks felt this way about The Diamond Head Game (a dull quiz with a tacked-on Hawaiian theme), although at least he was able to joke about it on Card Sharks.
Speaking of Eubanks, it had long since reached Urban Legend status that a lady on The Newlywed Game gave "in the ass" as an answer to "Where is the weirdest place you've ever gotten the urge to make whoopie?" For years, Eubanks denied that it ever happened, although this could be due to mis-remembered details. Many people thought it was a black lady who gave the answer assertively; when the clip finally surfaced (on GSN), it turned out to be a fairly normal white lady named Olga who said it questioningly. The clip appeared on several blooper shows that Eubanks hosted or co-hosted (always censored, except for its appearance in Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind), and on one such special Eubanks remarked "I hope we bury it!"
He never liked Trivia Trap because he didn't think its format made sense (players worked to eliminate the wrong answers instead of just providing the right one), so the format was overhauled partway through the run...into a rather lackluster Q&A with a nonsensical title.
The show has pretty much refused to acknowledge two of the three pilots. The first (Shopper's Bazaar, taped in September 1973 with Chuck Woolery as host) had little in common with the final product other than the overall mechanic of "Hangman meets Roulette". The two pilots shot under the title Wheel of Fortune on August 28, 1974 more closely resembled what made it to air, albeit with a drunken Edd "Kookie" Byrnes hosting. In the E! True Hollywood Story, creator Merv Griffin and NBC boss Lin Bolen pretty much disowned all three. Outside two brief clips from the first Byrnes pilot on the ceremonial 3,000th show in 1998 and about five publicity shots of Bazaar, no trace of them was made public until all three note (well, the first two and the first 9:26 of #3) surfaced on YouTube during 2012. To say the fandom rejoiced would be a big understatement.
While the show started on NBC's daytime schedule in 1975, the more familiar version to viewers is the nighttime syndicated version, which began in 1983. Acknowledgements of daytime overall are rare, although they may be somewhat justified as a large part of the first 10 years was erased thanks to idiocy at not only NBC, but Merv's company. This means little acknowledgment of original daytime host-hostess tandem Chuck Woolery and Susan Stafford (who were replaced in 1981 and 1982, respectively, by Pat Sajak and Vanna White — the same pair that has helmed nighttime since day one). Likewise, there is little to no acknowledgement of the two men who took Pat's place after he stepped down from daytime in 1989 to do a talk show: Rolf Benirschke note (of the San Diego Chargers) and (following a Channel Hop to CBS) Bob Goen. In short, the show has sort of undergone an Adaptation Displacement of itself, as the nighttime version outshone daytime and continues to this day.
David Sidoni and Tanika Ray co-hosted the short-lived Wheel 2000, a No Budget children's version that aired on CBS in 1997-98. It rarely gets mentioned these days.
The lack of acknowledging Rolf is particularly sore given that Wheel has done quite a few things with the Chargers over the years.
...But then came February 20, 2013 — as had been the case for most of Season 30 up to that point, footage of a classic Bonus Round was shown after Round 2. In this case, the puzzle was THE HIMALAYAS, which was quickly discovered to have been taken from...Rolf's premiere.
Averted by Jeopardy!, which doesn't have the "lifetime ban" rule (unless you were on the Trebek version, in which case you can return once he departs). Players of the classic Art Fleming era have returned, with photos shown of their old appearance if possible. Most notably, Burns Cameron (the biggest winner of the original NBC era) was invited for the Super Jeopardy! tournament in 1990.
On the other hand, they've buried Jep!, a kiddie spin-off that accompanied Wheel 2000.
