Some TV shows can be "laugh-out-loud funny", if only for a lot of the wrong reasons.
- [adult swim] once had a bizarre fake 15-minute infomercial that starts off with a product called "Icelandic Ultra Blue
" whose definition and use keeps changing. It then shifts to a music video for a possible new jingle, an appearance by the singer's producer, an ad for an air purifier that uses the Holocaust as a comparison, a store that buys Nazi Gold, a splinter removal center called "Fatfuck's" (the owner's last name), another Icelandic Ultra Blue product for embalming, the new product jingle written by the announcer's nephew, an ad for a dance club, and then another ad for an Ultra Blue product that takes place AT the dance club which borders on the homoerotic. The short ends back at the beginning, with the main developer mentioning "stage one is complete" as sinister music plays in the background. As it turns out, this was the only broadcast episode of Paid Programming, from David Cross and H. John Benjamin. It was probably intentional. - American Gladiators is, and always has been, the best comedy show on television. Other versions, like the Australian version, too, just because of how much fun they are.
- American Idol: Almost any performance by any of the Hopeless Auditionees has to count. Special mention goes to one General Larry Platt from season 9, who tried to impress the judges with this musical number:"Pants on the ground! Pants on the ground! Lookin' like a FOO wit yo pants on the ground!"
- America Unearthed: Scott Wolter believes every different European group made it to the Americas before Columbus, including Knights Templar with the Holy Grail. He goes around chasing Victorian era forgeries and folk-tales in an attempt to prove these opinions correct.
- Ancient Aliens: Aliens are behind...everything. And a man with Eraserhead hair will tell you all about them.
- The English dub of the Chinese tokusatsu series Armor Hero can be considered such for its lack of effort. Right from the first episode, the dub actors' dialogue is delivered in such a way that it makes them sound bored out of their minds, and there is a female child character whose dubbed voice is clearly that of an older woman trying to mimic the sound of a girl.
- The Adam West version of Batman built its run on being So Bad, It's Good. Specifically, it was So Cheesy It's Awesome. It even featured Batman surfing with the Joker. See it for yourself.
- The Christian kids show Bibleman concerns an overweight middle-aged businessman who was sick of "wealth, status [and] success", so he finds a muddy Bible in the rain and decides to don a terrible costume that vaguely resembles Power Ranger gear and fight some of the flattest enemies this side of Captain Planet with a Laser Blade alongside his two sidekicks while shouting Bible quotes. Oh yes. It seems to always be aware of how goodly-bad it is. And the deliberately over-the-top Lex Luthor-esque villain they had for a while was hilarious!
The Transformation Sequence based on Ephesians 6:14-17: "Breastplate of Righteousness! Helmet of Salvation! Waistbelt of Truth! Shoes of Peace! Shield of Faith! And the Sword of the Spirit. I'll take the tunnel bike. Track me." For the curious, blow-by-blow reviews of the series can be found here. Nothing is more awesome than this scene from one of the episodes. "Ooh Bibleman, you're just too easy no doubt!" And the series becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when you realize what else Willie Ames was in... - Big Bad Beetleborgs' attempts at comic relief often fell flat, especially if you compare it to the two series it was adapted from, B-Fighter and B-Fighter Kabuto. Apart from the costumes, BBB is a different show and it was awesome for it. B-Fighter and B-Fighter Kabuto were far more serious, being closer to the tone that VR Troopers would adapt. It is good that, in an age where every Tokusatsu adaptation was trying to ride on the waves of Power Rangers, BBB tried to do something different by wholeheartedly embracing the absurdity of the concept.
- In-universe example for The Big Bang Theory with Serial Ape-ist 2: Monkey See, Monkey Kill starring Penny and Wil Wheaton. From the small amount that is shown, the movie is absolutely awful but apparently has a decent cult following.
- The British press treated Bonekickers with, at first, Bile Fascination, but later decided it was a So Bad, It's Good Guilty Pleasure. The show was immensely popular with real archaeologists for its factually absurd details like cleaning ancient bones with metal tools and standing on the edges of trenches, ludicrous ignorance of history (such as treating it as a history-book rewriting mystery when hearing the skeleton of an English Crusader was found carrying a Saracen coin, which is easily explicable based on knowing anything about The Crusades at all) and for Dr Magwilde, the leader of the team who knows nothing about history, appreciates it mainly based on who was creating the biggest buildings (calling Stonehenge a 'rockery'), and routinely throws away and breaks historical artifacts.
- Britannia High is a largely forgotten, British—as the name would suggest—musical drama set in a performing arts school that lasted nine episodes before being axed (after regularly being beaten in the ratings by Antiques Roadshow), which has perhaps the unique distinction of being a substandard rip-off of Glee aired a year before Glee even started - in actuality, it was probably intended to be a copy of the High School Musical films. (Although the producers swore on a stack of Bibles that it wasn't anything like High School Musical, ohhhhh no. Perhaps ITV shouldn't have begun screening the series a few days after High School Musical 3: Senior Year was released in Britain if they didn't want comparisons made.) With lines like 'Don't be a wannabe; be who you want to be' played completely straight; every other episode featuring increasingly bizarre cameos from various 'celebrities', where the plot comes to a complete standstill to allow the characters to squee over the fact they've just met, say, Nicola from Girls Aloud, and a cast so cliched and two-dimensional their relevant tropes feel like a full character description, and you're already in for more cheese than a fondue party before you even get to the musical numbers. The songs themselves rarely get any better than So Okay, It's Average, but the choreography - featuring such delights as table tennis and what Charlie Brooker described as a psychodramatic landscape conveying the dyslexic agony of being unable to spell words like 'was' or doing schoolwork in the shadow of a giant projected clock - is this trope to a tee. Ed Sheeran even auditioned for the show, but things turned out much better for him than they would have if he starred on this show.
- Cleopatra 2525 and Jack of All Trades were both were created as Follow the Leader series for the shows that created So Bad, It's Good campy 1990s adventure shows, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. Jack does have an excellent theme song, though. (And what do Jack, Herc and Xena have in common? None other than Bruce Campbell.)
- Community has several in-universe examples:
- Troy, Abed, and friends watch bad movies and make fun of them.
- Jeff implies this about the Dean's novel Time Desk: The Chronicles Of Dean Dangerous: "That is the worst book I will ever read cover-to-cover."
- Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura is filled with Logical Fallacies and lots of Narm throughout. It's also hosted by Jesse Ventura (as you can tell from the title), who seems to think he's at the center of every government conspiracy out there and takes advice from Alex Jones of all people! Clearly, the show is intended to be some sort of documentary on conspiracy theories, but it comes off more as just some dumb fun that you watch when there's nothing else on TV. A bad show, but makes for some great YouTube Poop videos.
- Cop Rock: The inclusion of campy musical numbers in what would have otherwise been a serious police procedural made this a show that was destined to become this.
- CSI: Miami: With acting so bad... (takes off sunglasses dramatically)... it's hilarious. Yeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! The season eight premiere was a flashback which included the origin of Horatio's sunglasses.
- Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life is one of the crowning examples of a Lifetime Original Movie which can be watched for unintentional comedy value.
- Dancing with the Stars had Cloris Leachman, who was saved by the public for being hilarious.
- The 2013 Irish TV series Deception, not to be confused with Deception (2013). An obvious attempt by TV3 (now Virgin Media Television) to cash in on rival network, RTE's success with Love/Hate. A good idea in concept, but thanks to poor acting and heavy amounts of Narm, wasn't executed well. One critic described it in Two Words: Compellingly crap.
- Doctor Who: The cheesealicious, chock-full-o'-synthesizer soundtrack of the late-1980s, especially in "Remembrance of the Daleks".
- "The Underwater Menace"; one printed review in SFX magazine describing it as "Plan Nine from Doctor Who".
- Thanks to Classic Who's No Budget nature, there's really only two ways to watch it - trying to pretend the special effects aren't that bad through the force of imagination, mind-expanding substances or sheer denial, or turning it into a big, famously fun game of 'recognise the common household items they have painted and turned into space props'. It's never not comically obvious, from the Dalek plungers, to the sink parts on the TARDIS console, to the turkey-tin used to hold surgical equipment in the mentioned-up-page "Remembrance of the Daleks", but at the same time makes you appreciate the creativity, resourcefulness and love of those who worked on the show to even get the effects to the level they are seen to be.
- In-Universe: The Fourth Doctor is shown to read theological books by Oolon Colluphid because they're so factually inaccurate and badly written that he constantly laughs his head off while reading them. This was based on Douglas Adams' own relationship with the works of theologian Don Cupitt.
- Dog with a Blog is probably the first Disney Channel show to be so bad it's good - it's about a snarky talking dog that has a blog that gets adopted by a family where only two children know he can talk! Not to mention the bad acting, lame humor, and laugh track. The whole thing feels like a fake sitcom someone from another show would work on which makes it rather amusing in a way...
- Downfall (2010) dipped into this Once per Episode with one of its Lifelines, which required the contestant to surrender a personal possession to use it. If they could win the following round quickly, the possession would be returned, else it would be thrown over the roof of the skyscraper the show was filmed on. Since the contestants weren't dumb enough to use anything of actual personal value, the lifeline ended up being more of a chance to throw their unwanted crap off the roof. To further the Narm, the host would usually ask the contestant about the possession they're surrendering and its supposed personal value, only to receive an answer that made it clear there was no personal value whatsoever. One contestant surrendered an old Christmas gift he secretly hated. Another contestant took off his sneakers on the spot to surrender them as his personal possession.
- Eurovision Song Contest: "WELCAHM TO ZA EUROVEESHUN SAWNG CAWNTEST IN (Insert city here)!"
- In 1991, Nickelodeon decided to cash in on the popularity of such shows as Degrassi Junior High and Beverly Hills, 90210 with their own (Canadian) high school drama called Fifteen. The show was riddled with hilariously bad acting, gaping plot holes (especially in the way characters often came and went without explanation), and shoestring production values. But all those flaws were precisely what made the series stand out from the other teen dramas being made at the time. Just look at this clip.
- For Our Children, an AIDS awareness/benefit concert organized by Disney Channel in 1993. You just can't go wrong with the likes of Salt-N-Pepa, Sheila E, Melissa Etheridge, Randy Newman, and Paula Abdul rocking their way through hilariously hipped-up renditions of little kid songs like "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and "I've Been Working On The Railroad". You can watch the entire concert here.
- Glee features liberal use of Auto-Tune, heavy Narm from treating high school show choir as Serious Business, and the most comically over-the-top plots known to man. Also, Trouty Mouth, an ode to one of the characters' huge lips.
- An in-universe example from The Good Guys. Dan Stark was a supercop in the 1980s and still acts that way today. He's only employed because he and his partner, Frank Savage, saved the governor's son from a kidnapping. It was later turned into a movie called "Savage & Stark" which Dan hails as a crime classic. Hearing the movie is going to be shown at a theater, Dan and Frank dress up and head to see it. They're thrown when, instead of appreciating it, the audience is laughing out loud at all the action on screen. Leaving, the two read the marquee for the first time to realize the movie is part of a "bad movies of the '80s" marathon and can't understand why modern audiences find this "classic" so terrible.
- The special effects in The Good Place look straight up terrible and are so obviously fake, mainly due to NBC shows often having pretty bad CGI in general. But it works with the show's narmy, cheesy, and whimsical charm.
- Goosebumps (1995). An ad for a Halloween marathon-which portrayed it as if it was a gritty 1980s Slasher Movie showed a baseball with fangs flying towards someone. And yes, all of it is that cheesy. And that's not even scratching the surface! Just try to watch "Don't Go to Sleep!" without laughing.
- The Great British Bake Off: Mel and Sue's puns, although in fairness they freely acknowledge themselves that the puns are terrible.
- Hair Battle Spectacular: A downright hilarious competition!
- Have I Got News for You, like most panel games, lives and dies on the strength of its guests, and so it can exhibit good badness in several different ways.
- Some of the guest hosts, especially Boris Johnson and BRIAN BLESSED, are easily flustered and/or completely unable to read the scripted material from the autocue convincingly, and yet are never anything less than hugely entertaining to watch, partly because of their own personalities and partly because they seem to bring out the best in the panellists.
- Bad guests usually fall into this, as the other panellists will mock them. For instance, David Shayler, Swampy, Robert Kilroy-Silk, and Piers Morgan are some of the most hated guests ever, but their appearances are still entertaining because of the other panellists' reactions to them. Utterly dreadful guests are few and far between, and only the apocalyptically bad, such as Russell Brand on his one sole appearancenote , are capable of muzzling the comic potential of the other panellists. Examples of such awfulness are Liza Tarbuck and Neil Kinnock as guest presenters.
- The third season of Heroes is like watching multiple train wrecks in superspeed. While on acid. Quite literally too, in the case of the ending of episode 3.16 ("Building 26").
- Hip Hop Harry: A kids' show about a giant rapping, break-dancing teddy bear.
- Wilson's amateur porno from House.
- How I Met Your Mother has at least two in-universe examples.
- The Robin Sparkles videos.
- Barney's deliberately-bad one-act play (revenge for Lily's unintentionally bad work of True Art). After the group starts to leave, he convinces them to stay by saying Act Two is a "masterpiece of awful."
- iCarly has at least two in-universe examples.
- The parody "Kelly Cooper: Terrible Movie" falls into this category.
- In "iFix a Pop Star", a pop star's comeback appears to be disastrous, since she looks extremely slipshod and does a terrible lipsync job. Everyone loves it anyway.
- The BBC's 1980s attempts to follow in the footsteps of I, Claudius, still regarded as one of the best mini-series ever made, ended up So Bad, It's Good instead.
- First was the 1981 series The Borgias, which to this day is still regarded as the worst costume drama ever made by The BBC. What should have been a compelling tale of one of the most notorious political families in European history ended up being reduced to an absolute mess thanks to, among other things, incompetent direction, the two writers that were responsible for the series (writing alternating episodes) clearly not having communicated with each other at all during the writing process (one of the writers wrote Lucrezia as a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, the other wrote her as a misunderstood nice girl), and perhaps most of all, Adolfo Celi's over-the-top performance as Rodrigo Borgia, which turned what should have been the most important bits of dialogue in the series into hilarity, thanks to his thick Italian accent (the producer apparently didn't learn that Celi's voice was dubbed over by Robert Rietti in Thunderball until it was too late).
- Then there was 1983's The Cleopatras, which might as well be The Borgias' Spiritual Successor. It opens with an extreme close-up of Graham Crowden plastered with more make-up than any of the actresses that appear in the series (in fact, all the male characters wear more makeup than their female counterparts), and only gets more and more ridiculous from there. Add in direction and editing from a Queen music video, a pseudo-prog rock soundtrack, and a script that can never decide how seriously to take itself, and you can see why most people considered the BBC's costume dramas to be out of fashion for most of the early Eighties.
- The Immortal is an early 2000s clone of Highlander starring Lorenzo Lamas as a demon hunter that appeared and vanished without a trace. One episode mainly featured characters standing out talking in rooms and a computer programmed by demons.
- Both the acting and the humour on Incredible Crew are so bad it's hard not to laugh.
- Jersey Shore: A bunch of unlikeable assholes fighting. Hugely entertaining and hilarious. Mob Wives is the same.
- Kamen Rider Blade can be murderously cheesy at times. The plot is basically non-existent until some 30 episodes in, the acting has ridiculous hiccups and while the practical effects tend to be top-notch, the CGI... not so much.
- The original Knight Rider undeniably qualifies. Remember, kids, half the genes in the body are expressed in the brain... unless you're David Hasselhoff, in which case they'll be expressed in the hair.
- The Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Intimidation Game", which focused on a terrorist group (an obvious parody of the Gamergate controversy) that harasses and attacks female video game developers, has generally been received this way for its hilariously strawmanned and stereotyped portrayal of gamers and its use of long-out-of-date gaming slang and cultural references.
- "Wildlife" is similarly enjoyed in an ironic way by fans of the series. It got a lot of initial press for having Detective Stabler get shot and for apparently resolving his and Olivia's UST (of course he lives and of course they don't), but afterwards became infamous for its Narm-laden plot, which sees the detectives get involved in a convoluted plot involving animal smuggling. It sees them match wits with ruthless smuggler Andre Bushido, played by none other than the Wishmaster himself, Andrew Divoff, and all the Ham and Cheese that implies. It features the most Bond Villain-esque method of a bad guy getting rid of an informant ever (siccing a hyena on him, which eats him so thoroughly that the detectives identify him from the bling it coughed up) and Christopher Meloni delivering the line "the monkey is in the basketball" dead seriously, almost immediately followed by Kragen giving said monkey a hug.
- L!ve TV, with its costumed News Bunny, its bouncing weather midget and above all its regular Topless Darts, among other things, was an entire channel of So Bad It's Good.
- Animal Planet's relatively new series Lost Tapes is so obviously staged that it's more fun to spot all the poor production values than to actually try to understand the story being presented. Their so-called "actual footage" of attacks by mythical creatures always features acting ranging from emotionally dead to some of the weirdest Large Hams you will ever see, in addition to very high-definition imagery barely even attainable by the best camcorders on the normal market today, let alone what people would carry out into the wilderness with them, and camera work that always catches the action suspiciously well - even if the camera operator was supposedly an 8-year-old girl. This page provides a more thorough list of blatant giveaways. And then there's the clip where a man in a gorilla suit without the mask attacks a hunter from behind in a "Sasquatch attack" sequence, clearly exposing his face (and very distinctive mustache, removing any doubt that he was a fake) to the camera for a full second.
- It helps that on occasion, the show actually manages to pull off some genuinely scary moments, such as the episode "Wendigo". When it doesn't, it's at least amusing.
- The hunting show MacMillan River Adventures, starring former WWE superstar Shawn Michaels. According to wrestling radio show hosts Bryan Alvarez and Vinny Verhei, it should be So Cool, It's Awesome, but instead it's simply So Bad, It's Good, for, among other things, a minutes-long speech in favor of the Second Amendment by Charlton Heston with no connection to the rest of the show, "hunting" that consists of three men shooting down a single deer in an enclosed area, and a promo that involved Shawn beating down his co-host who was pretending to be various WWE wrestlers.
- Spike TV's gloriously stupid trivia show MANswers, where the MANswer to every question is invariably boobies, or explosions. Bonus points for the Large Ham narrator who sounds like he's drunk on his own testosterone and never speaks below a full-bodied shout. The show is actually based on a Japanese series that presents the same facts in a serious and no-nonsense fashion. Spike just made the show more AWESOME!
- Masked Rider. Take Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, dial the cheese factor up, use haphazardly used stock footage from Kamen Rider shows, add a sitcom premise, and voila! Now, you have a series that will never fail to be entertainingly bad.
- Mysteries from Beyond the Other Dominion: With Dr. Franklin Ruehl PHD
- Monsters Resurrected featuures some of the most hypobolic and insane depictions of prehistoric life you'll ever see... and it utterly harilous for it.
- It looks like Mystery Science Theater 3000 lives on this. The entire point is to show horrible movies and make fun lines about them and so many of the films shown come off like this. However, the creators have openly stated they try their best to avoid such films as it's actually far more fun to take on stuff that was trying to be good but failing horribly. As Frank Conniff put it in an interview "we don't want 'so bad it's good', we're looking for just plain bad."
- Tommy Wiseau, the person who made the notoriously cheesy film The Room (2003), apparently made a TV show called The Neighbors (2015). As you would expect, it contains the same awkward dialogue, stilted acting, and scenes that go nowhere that were present in The Room. Interestingly, Wiseau appears to have tried to go for a silly, campy vibe when making this show, but failed at that as well, adding on to its cheesy goodness.
- For the few that manage to sit through it, Pak De Poen De Show Van 1 Miljoen could very well be this. It is legitimately funny to see how overly formal one host can be in a game show that has you answer questions to show how awesome Belgian television is. In some very twisted logic, one can even believe that even the poor production values are there to make the show feel as Belgian as possible. Besides, the performances during the intermezzos of the show are So Cool, It's Awesome.
- The A&E series Paranormal State tried to be a legitimate ghost hunting show, but with such heavy editing in of sound and visual effects that it loses all sense of atmosphere or spookiness. Still, the overacting of the people on the show, combined with the increasingly over-the-top editing, and the host claiming early in the show to having been stalked by a demon and involved in exorcisms, make it at least laugh-worthy.
- The unsold NBC pilot Poochinski, starring Peter Boyle as a slovenly detective who gets killed in action and comes back to life as a fake-looking bulldog.
- Power Rangers was this, especially Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. It got better as time went by, though, but it's still like this. Super Sentai, especially a lot of the early 1980s series (before Dengeki Sentai Changeman and Choujuu Sentai Liveman) likewise. Power Rangers RPM averts this trope, being a good post-apocalyptic action series with an often serious tone, well-developed characters (especially Dr. K) and a main antagonist that is very threatening and never played for laughs (a computer virus which has taken over 99% of the world), and the series often pokes fun at the campy elements of past series.
- The career of Paul Tripp, a now-forgotten musician and kids' show host before Mister Rogers, was practically on its last legs by 1985, and at that time, he was involved in the "See & Learn" series of educational videos aimed at rather young children, released directly to video. Even keeping the target audience in mind, they are hilarious in their badness. A typical example is "The Return of Halley's Comet", meant to coincide with the perihelion of 1986, which contains hokey songs that are often off-key, as the singer, who in one segment pretends to be Edmond Halley, just cannot keep proper scansion. If that weren't enough, most of the segments were animated, but "animated" is probably not the best word to describe them, as they were just unmoving drawings with voice-overs, garishly colored in a manner that makes one's eyes bleed. To give just one example, the reporter character appears in the exact same pose in his two different segments, with absolutely no alteration. When the video tells the story of how scientists from around the world all tried to confirm the comet's reappearance in 1758, they are all given Just a Stupid Accent, with the Chinese astronomer's dialogue suffering from Unfortunate Implications. When you add in that Tripp tries to sound grandfatherly, but (hopefully unintentionally) winds up sounding like a pedophile instead, the whole thing becomes impossible to take seriously in any capacity. Ultimately the whole thing must be watched to be believed, as this description doesn't do justice to how hilariously awful the video is.
- In the early hours of the morning, Canadian children's station YTV would air PJ Katie's Farm, an arts and crafts show. The show's host was the titular PJ Katie, a young woman who would play with clay figurines in front of a barn made of popsicle sticks. What made the show memorable was how bizarre it was. Katie was incredibly hyperactive, even for a children's show host and, most of the time, appeared to be stoned out of her mind. The show was obviously improvised and contained a lot of bizarre commentary, random laughter, plenty of bloopers, and an uncomfortable amount of dead air. Despite all this, it has a really weird charm that gained it a cult following in Canada.
- Redman, a No Budget spinoff of the Ultra Series of which half of the entertainment is derived from the ratty old rubber suits the title hero fights, and the other half of which comes from how unnecessarily brutal Redman is towards the monsters to the point of being a Memetic Psychopath. It's quite entertaining with the right mindset.
- Reign tries to be like Game of Thrones, but falls closer to Gossip Girl. The result is hilarious.
- Revolution has many who level many criticisms about poor acting, plot holes, Narm, and so on. However, this show managed to earn this reaction by the first season finale.
- In the same vein as RoboCop 3, RoboCop: Prime Directives was an attempt to get the franchise back on track after the weak response to 3 and the kid-friendly RoboCop: The Series, but the producers couldn't decide whether they wanted to make it Darker and Edgier or a goofy satire. As a result, it's filled with laugh-out moments, coupled with a near-nonexistent production budget (as it was filmed in Canada on the cheap). The actor playing the Corrupt Corporate Executive, Damien Lowe, chews scenery with reckless abandon. Page Fletcher (who portrays the title robot) is wearing an ill-fitting suit and chooses to portray Robo getting shot up by multiple assailants as someone who's having chronic seizures. There are plenty of script howlers ("Go get 'em, Dad!", "Now I own your black ass"), the fight scenes between Robo and RoboCable are staged as a Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots battle (with both of the characters hitting each other on the head and chest futilely while epic music plays), the death scenes are either played for laughs or with no emotion whatsoever, and the entire proceedings are backed by plenty of cheesy and archaic (for the time) special effects that look they were made in the mid-'90s. Despite all that, there's some enjoyment to be had with the fact that it is intended to be a serious sequel to the first film, and it does have some great performances from Maurice Dean Wint and Leslie Hope.
- Saved by the Bell: The N (now TeenNick) promos for this show tell viewers to "Embrace the cheese." [adult swim] temporarily aired the show with the same philosophy, with bumps featuring the show's silliest moments in psychedelic slow-motion.
- 7th Heaven: Brought to you by Brenda Hampton, Anvilicious morality lessons, atrocious acting, elevated melodrama, and ridiculous Soap Opera plots intermixed with religion (without actually saying "Jesus" for most of the show) make this show hilariously awful, especially since in real life, the antics of the kids would have gotten their Reverend Father suspended from his position a long time ago, if not outright fired! There was an episode where a kid threatened to throw himself off the roof of his apartment complex because his mother bought him some lame jeans. The Secret Life of the American Teenager, also created by Brenda Hampton, goes to show that not everyone learns from their mistakes.
- Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee is on the Food Network. The food itself consists mostly of seasoning packets and canned food thrown together (and her cookbooks are one big Product Placement), and she seems to care more about making it look pretty than making it edible. Her decorations are not only horribly tacky but would probably be very inconvenient. She seems to care more about getting drunk and making elaborate tablescapes than cooking.Here's her infamous "Kwanzaa cake".
- This "Jump" music video from Sesame Street is quite laughable, although it was the 1990s...
- Smallville is often at its best when it stops trying to make people treat the tragic intertwined destinies of Clark and Lex seriously and just embraces a live-action DC universe and all the insanity that entails.
- The musical drama Smash had a truly great pilot hailed by critics. The resulting series, however, soon fell into this territory big-time from its laughable musical numbers to attempts at drama and often insane characters.
- TruTV's South Beach Tow is a "reality" series which is ostensibly about the lives of a crew of repo men, but is actually preceded by a disclaimer that says events were reconstructed based on first-hand accounts. Of course, the situations are shown in the most over-the-top way possible, and yet the "actors" play it completely deadpan. One of the characters, Bernice, has fallen off the upper level of a parking garage (shown by having a model dummy fall off the edge), used a jetpack to chase after a man fleeing on a yacht and tossed a woman from a moving vehicle. Couple that with howlers like "You killed my friend! Hey, don't let them escape!", it has become a source of hilarity, as people watch to see what absurd situations will pop up next.
- Spider-Man (Japan). On top of the cheesiness, it's also Toei's earliest example of Humongous Mecha (yes, Spider-Man gets his own giant robot) in tokusatsu shows, even before Super Sentai popularized the concept.
- Splatalot is essentially a huge kid-friendly version of Wipeout, and all of the splats and spills look scripted. But it's what makes it fun to riff on with your friends.
- Despite how they look, the falls are actually not scripted. However, players who are meant to represent a certain category, teachers for example, are not actually teachers and are instead just people pretending to be that role.
- Throughout The '80s, New York public access hosted Stairway to Stardom, an absolutely charming No Budget talent show. It started off with big-band singer/talent director Evie May producing The Frank Masi Nostalgia Hour, with Frank given a show to croon bygone standards. Soon after, Frank was hosting a cavalcade of awkward comedians, hokey impressionists, cheesy renditions of pop and Broadway hits, and even puppets! It all comes together into a giant steaming heap of great television, which NPR describes as "a low-rent precursor to American Idol". Some die-hard fans of the show have put together a YouTube tribute channel, amassing hundreds of hours of SoS from VHS recordings. Witness Opie, Anthony, and Jim Norton feel the love here.
- Star Trek:
- "Spock's Brain" is so awesomely bad that, when you approach it the right way, it becomes one of the funniest Trek episodes ever made. Rumor has it that the script originated as a prank at the expense of Gene Roddenberry. C'mon, say it, people:"Brain and brain! What is BRAIN?!"
- "Night Terrors". C'mon, the flying Troi scenes are unbeatable.
- "Sub Rosa", the TNG episode where Dr. Crusher has sex with a ghost who lives in a candle in Space Scotland and her dead grandma comes back as a zombie.
- "Threshold". Paris travels at infinite speed, becomes a catfish, and impregnates catfish Janeway. And he's cured by injections of antimatter.
- The original series episode "The Omega Glory". There's something about that American flag. The Pledge and the Spock-like Satan illustration did not help. Shatner's trademark delivery worked well when he said, "Look at these words... written bigger... than the rest... tall words... proudly saying... 'We... the Pe... ople...'"
- The Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Storm Front" is mostly just dull. But... the last 10 minutes have the Enterprise Old School Dogfighting Stukas armed with plasma guns over Manhattan. Yeah.
- Genesis. Everyone devolves into prehistoric monsters: Nurse Ogawa and Dr. Crusher are apes, Picard is a "monkey", Troi is amphibious, Worf is a wild Neanderthal Klingon, Riker is a wild Neanderthal human, Reg Barclay is a human/spider hybrid, and Spot the cat (Spot the male cat who just had kittens, I might add) is an iguana!
- "Spock's Brain" is so awesomely bad that, when you approach it the right way, it becomes one of the funniest Trek episodes ever made. Rumor has it that the script originated as a prank at the expense of Gene Roddenberry. C'mon, say it, people:
- The Star Wars Holiday Special: Despite the poorly animated cartoon segments, annoying Wookiee sounds, excessive amount of pointless filler, and the fact that George Lucas wanted every copy to be destroyed, we enjoy how the special is narm.
- John Sergeant's performance on Strictly Come Dancing Series 6. He got half as many points from the judges but the public vote kept on saving him. It got to the point where he actually withdrew from the show out of fear that he might actually win it.
- The show took this trope and ran with it in later series, deliberately including celebrities whose dancing was so awful and campy it was hilarious. Examples include Ann Widdecombe in Series 8 (who came 6th!), Russell Grant in Series 9, and Dave Myers (and to a lesser extent, Mark Benton, who was definitely geared towards comedy but had some genuine ability) in Series 11.
- Sunset Beach: Many American soaps can qualify but the one that takes the cake is this one. We're talking wobbling sets, terrible writing, overdramatic music, and pantomime style acting... which may explain it being short-lived (by American soap standards), running for only three years before it was cancelled.
- Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad: Its source material is a Cult Classic in its home country praised for its groundbreaking (for the time) special effects and engaging story. This show is also loved by those who remember watching it...just for the opposite reasons. And yes, that really is with an "S".
- The Chicago-based show Svengoolie prides itself on being So Bad Its Good, taking Stylistic Suck to unheard-of levels. For bonus points, it lampooned films that fall under this category 16 years before MST3K debuted.
- Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills has such lousy editing, such sucky special effects, such horrible horrible acting it ends up being funny.
- The songs featured on long-running UK pop showcase Top of the Pops were generally accompanied by either a specially created video from the artists or a live performance (usually mimed, sometimes with live vocals but mimed instruments, and, once in a long while, with live vocals and instruments). Although the in-studio performances included some seminal pop culture moments - David Bowie's 1972 performance of "Starman", a 19-year-old Kate Bush's career-starting performance of "Wuthering Heights" in 1978, the Spice Girls launching the "Cool Britannia" movement with their 1996 performance of "Wannabe" - they included just as many laughably terrible, "can't look away" moments, especially when the artists rebelled against the idea of miming to a recording. What follows is merely a sample of the latter.
- When Rod Stewart and his Faces bandmates appeared on the programme in 1971 to mime along to a recording of "Maggie May", his vocals were done live, but he and his bandmates gradually dropped all pretence that the instrumental backing was also live. Ronnie Wood openly stopped miming along on guitar, guest mandolin mimer John Peel sat unconvincingly hunched over the instrument, and eventually Rod and his bandmates had a kickabout with a football that had somehow made its way onto the set. After this, the genie was out of the bottle for further deliberately bad yet hilarious performances.
- Glam rock band Mud mimed along to their Christmas 1974 single "Lonely This Christmas" with the aid of a ventriloquist's dummy controlled by lead singer Les Gray, who used the dummy to "recite" the song's spoken-word bridge while he himself mugged for the camera. All while vast amounts of fake snow fell from the studio ceiling to blanket the members of the band.
- The Boomtown Rats' TotP performances of their 1978 hit "Rat Trap" did not include the single's guest saxophonist, Alan Holmes, so in one appearance, lead singer Bob Geldof mimed along to the sax solo with a candelabra with a sax mouthpiece.
- New Order's 1983 performance of "Blue Monday" was one of the few genuinely live performances in TotP's history - and its comically awful quality shows why such performances were so rare. The studio was simply not configured for live sound, and Gillian Gilbert's synthesisers gradually overpowered the other musicians, while the pre-recorded MIDI tracks got further and further out of sync with the live performance. The grimaces on the faces of lead vocalist Bernard Sumner and bassist Peter Hook as the song ended said it all.note
- All About Eve's 1988 half-performance - yes, half-performance - of "Martha's Harbour" went down in immediate infamy. Thanks to a technical malfunction, the studio audience could hear the recording but the band couldn't, so they spent the entire first half of the song sitting motionless on stools in a cloud of dry ice fog, waiting for their cue to begin miming; lead singer Julianne Regan's chagrined expression once they actually did begin miming spoke volumes. The TotP producers invited the band to return for the following episode as a way of apologising for the gaffe, but this time they would perform the song live, and their second performance went much more smoothly and gave the record a boost in the charts, but the first half-performance is the one everyone remembers and still laughs at decades later.
- One of the most notorious "so bad it's hilarious" performances came from Nirvana's sole appearance, a 1991 rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Demonstrating their utter contempt for the practice of singing live while miming to a pre-recorded backing track, bassist Krist Novoselic spent the entire song mugging for the camera, drummer Dave Grohl waved his arms wildly as if channelling The Muppet Show's Animal, and lead singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain sang the song an octave lower than he had done in the studio and opened with the lyrics "Load up on drugs, kill your friends". They were never invited back.
- Sometimes, the artists were unavailable either live or recorded, so the producers matched the song to a dance routine featuring their in-house dancers: the Go-Jos (1964-68), Pan's People (1968-76), Ruby Flipper (1976), Legs & Co (1976-81), and Zoo (1981-83). Though most of the dancers were talented, the choreography frequently strayed into so-bad-it's-good territory, particularly in the Pan's People and Legs & Co. eras when song lyrics were often interpreted rather too literally (it was sometimes joked that viewers could watch a Legs & Co. routine with the sound turned off and still guess the song to which they were dancing). Examples include Jimmy Webb's 1968 hit "Macarthur Park", for which Pan's People wore cheap cake costumes in a nod to the line "Someone left the cake out in the rain"; Gilbert O Sullivan's 1973 hit "Get Down", where the line "You're a bad dog, baby" inspired the Pan's People choreographers to have the five female dancers addressing a group of five thoroughly confused-looking dogs sat in a row on a bench (one of which did his own literal interpretation of the order to "get down" by hopping off the bench and trotting off set ten seconds into the routine); and The Clash's 1980 hit "Bankrobber", performed by Legs & Co in convict costumes with each dancer behind an individual prop set of prison bars.note
- Touched by an Angel, particularly the time when one of the angels goes to a nightclub and spends the rest of the episode high on ecstasy. The time one of them randomly went blind comes a distant yet respectable second.
- Ultra Series:
- Like Godzilla, the English-language dubs of the Ultra Series have achieved this status (sometimes intentionally so), even amongst the fandom. For some, it goes well with the nature of the special effects (due to the creators being the special effects team for the Godzilla movies), but later series have, for the most part, improved drastically in props, costumes, and graphics.
- The Ultra Fight spinoffs, conceived as a "zero-budget" series to save Tsuburaya Productions from bankruptcy after the failure of Mighty Jack and Operation Mystery and reignite popular interest in Ultra Series content during the gap between Ultraseven and Return of Ultraman, is made of this trope. While earlier episodes were simply reused footage of fight scenes from Ultraman and Ultraseven with pro-wrestling style narration, once the series ran out of stock footage new footage was filmed. However, the new footage had minimal plot and consisted of ratty, deteriorated kaiju suits engaging in a Wimp Fight with each other, with the setting often being a BBC Quarry, a field or a beach and shot in a way that doesn't make the kaiju seem gigantic. It's essentially the precursor to Redman, which is also this trope. The series saved Tsuburaya Productions and the company seems to have embraced its reputation, as later series sometimes had spinoffs deliberately recreating the low-budget aesthetics of Ultra Fight, with Ultra Super Fight and Sevenger Fight being some examples.
- The early seasons of Undressed, an MTV serial show from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Initially, MTV tried to market it as a serious drama about romantic relationships. However, because of horrendous acting, production values better suited to a community access program than a serious cable show, and dialogue that sounded as if it was written by an eighth-grader, the show developed quite an audience for all the wrong reasons. MTV apparently figured out the real reason people were watching it—later seasons were deliberately comedic.
The show itself was however surprisingly progressive (for MTV, anyway) about sexuality. It frequently featured various non-stereotypical gay couples, frank storylines about high schoolers having sex without being morally punished, and a fairly tolerant attitude towards fetishes (including the Furry Fandom). Still a pretty lousy show, but it did have its good points. You could also play a drinking game with that show; take a shot for every actor whose career was launched by that show. - Young Blades, a PAX series about the children of The Three Musketeers, was terrible. It is also one of the most laugh-out-loud hilarious things televised. The show is chock-full of anachronisms, poor writing, shoddy effects, inexplicable plotlines, and rampant history fail. The premise was ridiculous and the acting was utterly absurd, the cast's performances ranging from painfully tedious to foaming-at-the-mouth hamtastic. Almost every element of the show was mind-numbingly silly and handled exceptionally poorly, and yet it's so epically awful that it deserves a watch on that basis alone. Funny, funny show.
- Mike Rowe's time selling drivel on late-night TV. He's so obviously pissed off with his job that he goes out of his way to ruin it.
- Sci Fi (now Syfy) Original Movies are notorious for this. Often, the special effects are sub-par at best, the acting tends to be from people at the very beginning or very end of their careers (the former tend to overact while the latter do the minimum effort), and many of the situations are downright ridiculous, especially if they try to give it a veneer of science. If you can accept them for what they are, they make for a very interesting Saturday movie marathon. Indeed, during SyFy's 20th anniversary, they stated that it was all intentional.
- Most Irish children's TV since the 1990s. The best puppet characters jumped ship and moved to adult-themed chat shows.
- Like Quizzone. This show embodies So Bad it's Good in every way. They seem to pick Ireland's dumbest children for the show. And instead of using their brains, they can look the answers up on a computer. It's a snazzy Apple Macintosh, but from the looks on their faces, you'd swear none of these children had used a search engine in their lives... The search engine in the show can deliver the answers in about five seconds, but the children seem to rip the answers from anything - they have quoted eBay listings...
The first series consisted of the children spending three minutes (the time limit to get the answers) while one member of their team sits with headphones on, unable to get into the Quizzone. Lather, rinse and repeat for every round! Also, the children all seem to have hearing problems. One thought that the team had informed them that the capital of South Africa was 'Cappa'! Another believes that dodos once lived on the island of Mexico...
The children on it were incredibly stupid, one team answered 'What type of animal is a Beagle?' with 'A squirrelly-bird'. Another boy got lost in the maze and repeatedly walked within feet of the finishing line but completely failed to see it. And then there's the narmy "referee". - "Physiquiz" presented by Kevo.
- Or ICE. They axed Dustin the Turkey for this?! Schoolyard Jungle is the best - how to tell your friends that they smell and how not to be influenced by ebil Peer Pressure (lightning clap) Well, should you be influenced to your friends or not?! The cardboard acting doesn't help—and who knew you needed a face ID to get into 15-rated movies? (You don't. You could just buy tickets for a U and then walk into a 15—not that the producers want you to know that or do that! It doesn't require a whole show to talk about it.)
- Or Star Search—featuring people who make X-Factor rejects sound like Elvis Presley. The perfect example of So Bad it's Good.
- Like Quizzone. This show embodies So Bad it's Good in every way. They seem to pick Ireland's dumbest children for the show. And instead of using their brains, they can look the answers up on a computer. It's a snazzy Apple Macintosh, but from the looks on their faces, you'd swear none of these children had used a search engine in their lives... The search engine in the show can deliver the answers in about five seconds, but the children seem to rip the answers from anything - they have quoted eBay listings...
