Literature / What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History

2004 book by David Hofstede celebrating the worst of television. Anything goes: individual plot points or elements, or even entire shows. It's an interesting reading to know what some people consider examples of "So Bad, It's Horrible" (or at the very least incredibly controversial).

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The List

1. The Star Wars Holiday Special ^note (This 1978 TV-movie is legendary for how bad it is. The special includes 15 minutes of untranslated Wookiee speak, variety show-style segments that go absolutely nowhere, and oddly jarring animation sequences. Hofstede declared the production "The Worst Two Hours of Television Ever" as the segment title. The special only aired once, and has never officially been re-aired; the only footage of it that remains intact is from cheap VHS recordings of its premiere. George Lucas is personally ashamed of this special, saying that he would gladly destroy every copy of it in existence if he had the time. Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher (who allegedly owned the only official copy of the program before her death), and co-star Anthony Daniels have all shared similar sentiments. It was exiled from Star Wars canon the moment it was over, one of the few parts of the franchise to suffer that fate prior to Disney's wholesale reboot in 2014. It's referenced in the xkcd strip used on TV Tropes as the page image for So Bad, It's Horrible. The only person who didn't have much shame for this special was Bea Arthur, who appeared as a cantina owner. (It's also one of the few segments in this special - the Boba Fett cartoon being another - that has few to no detractors.) The special was one of the last gasps of the "variety show" era of The '70s, with NBC's Pink Lady and Jeff (which gets its own entry) delivering the killing blow to the variety genre two years later.invoked
2. Dallas' infamous "Bobby in the shower"/All Just a Dream cop-out ^note (The final scene of the Season 9 finale revealed that all the events from Bobby's death onward didn't actually happen, and were all just a dream. The reveal was done to get Patrick Duffy back on the program after a season of declining ratings following his character's death. It met with derision from the viewing public, and couldn't fully undo the damage of having Bobby die in the first place.)
3. The Jerry Springer Show turning from a decent talk show into a freak show for violent, sexually deviant human trash ^note (Hofstede did acknowledge that Springer hasn't tried to hide that his show's one of the all-time classic examples of trash TV. He did throw a Take That! to two other faux-Oprah Winfrey talk show hosts - Sally Jesse Raphael and Maury Povich.) For what it's worth this is almost certainly the most (if not only) financially successful thing you'll see on this list - Springer didn't call it quits until 2018 (a total of 27 seasons) and reruns are still aired in syndication.
4. Jackie Gleason's flop Game Show You're in the Picture (1961) ^note (A game show wherein celebrities stuck their heads through large cut-outs and tried to guess what they were. Only one episode actually made it to air; the episode that was supposed to air the following week was replaced by a 30-minute apology from Gleason that was considered far more entertaining than the game show was. The remainder of the season was filled out by a one-on-one informal talk show entitled The Jackie Gleason Show.)
5. CNN tries to promote new journalist Paula Zahn as "sexy" ^note (A 2002 promo for Zahn's series American Morning claimed her to be provocative, super smart, and "just a little sexy", followed by a sound effect of a zipper being unzipped. The spot created all kinds of controversy for CNN, who pulled the ad after only a handful of airings. Zahn left CNN in 2007.)
6. The 1950s quiz show scandals ^note (Several late-1950s game shows were rigged to help contestants that execs wanted to win, bump players the execs wanted to lose, and generally fabricate "drama". The jig was up when a Dotto contestant came forth with evidence to prove it. The brouhaha that ensued resulted in the blacklisting of various producers, most notably Jack Barry and Dan Enright, who produced 21, one of the shows involved in the scandal. Twenty-One was canceled soon after champion Charles Van Doren admitted it was rigged, and it had the added effect of killing Van Doren's NBC and Columbia University careers. The scandals also led to new laws regarding television that are still in effect to this day. Said laws also ended sponsor control over nonfiction programming after it came to light that some of the demands to rig the shows came from them. The scandals also put a decades-long wound in quiz shows - apart from Jeopardy!, no new major quiz shows surfaced until the 1970s, and it would take Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 1999 to revive shows with regular cash prizes from $125,000/$250,000 up.)
7. The inclusion of Scrappy-Dooinvoked in the Scooby-Doo franchise (1979-88) ^note (Scrappy's inclusion did help somewhat with Hanna-Barbera's issues with the show running stale. Ratings improved with the target demographic of children at the time, which is part of the reason Scrappy remained a regular cast member for six more years. But Scrappy's overwhelming hatred amongst the older fans of the cartoon gradually caught up to the character, the show, the franchise, and the studio. Hanna-Barbera eventually (following the cancellation of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, the last series to feature Scrappy) ejected the character from the franchise as hard as possible by basically making Scrappy an Unperson. To this day, any re-releases of Scooby-Doo media that included Scrappy almost always leave him out of advertisements entirely. Hanna-Barbera also opted to make the next Scooby-Doo show a prequel series called A Pup Named Scooby-Doo which had no inclusion of Scrappy whatsoever. Scrappy ended up pulling a Face–Heel Turn and became the Big Bad for the 2002 live-action movie, making one of his very few appearances past the 1980s, albeit an appearance that ruthlessly mocked and belittled the character.)
8. Geraldo Rivera reports on the discovery of Al Capone's vault and finds nothing (1986) ^note (After a vault was discovered in one of Al Capone's old headquarters, journalist Geraldo Rivera created a special titled The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault, without knowing what was actually inside of the vault. For two hours, Rivera hyped up the mystery of what could potentially be inside. At the end, the safe was finally opened to reveal nothing but tons of dirt, making the whole thing one giant Anti-Climax.)
9. Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? ^note (2000 Fox reality one-off in which women competed to win the hand of a multi-millionaire, who turned out not to be as loaded as was previously thought {his worth was just over $2 million, the bare minimum to be considered a "multi-millionaire", but he was played up as being worth much more}. He and the winner never consummated and quickly annulled, making the two-hour special a wash. Further controversy due to FOX failing to discover legal issues and lies with the bride and groom led to the cancellation of the program, which was intended to be a yearly event; the entire idea became an embarrassment to the bride by the next year.)
10. The Heidi Bowl ^note (1968 football game between the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders which ran overtime. NBC notoriously broke away before the game was over to air the TV movie Heidi, thereby missing two Oakland touchdowns scored in the final minute that gave the Raiders the victory. TV programming technology at the time made it impossible to go back to the game after switching to the movie. The controversy that ensued led to a rule requiring that TV networks must air sports games in their entirety. New technology was also added to convey messages in-network quickly; a call from NBC's then-president to put the game back on failed to go through as the phone lines to NBC were clogged with people wondering where the football game went.)
11. The Brady Bunch Hour ^note (1976-77 Brady Bunch spinoff/continuation where the actors/characters {minus Eve Plumb} star in a variety show. Plumb's decision not to participate and her character being recast was spoofed in The Simpsons episode "The Simpsons Spinoff Showcase", where Lisa refuses to participate in a family variety show and is replaced with an older, attractive actress. The series was co-devised by Fred Silverman and Sid and Marty Krofft, whose collective televisual output provides several further entries on this list.)
12. My Mother the Car ^note (Notoriously bad 1965 show in which Jerry Van Dyke ends up with his mother's soul possessing a vintage automobile...never mind that that's not how reincarnation is supposed to work. It was also parodied in the same episode of "The Simpsons Spinoff Showcase" with The Love-Matic Grandpa.)
13. Televangelist Oral Roberts announces that God will "call him home" if he doesn't receive $8,000,000 from his flock ^note (He needed funding for his debt-ridden hospital, City of Faith, hence the announcement. Although he did receive the money at the last minute, the hospital closed down anyway a few years later.)
14. The Anna Nicole Show ^note (2002-04 E! Reality Show about the former Playboy model who became famous for marrying business and oil magnate J. Howard Marshall and taking his family to court over his inheritance. Anna Nicole Smith was clearly unbalanced and/or stoned during filming and extra pressures of the show arguably hastened her 2007 death.)
15. The Emmy Awards' flawed voting process ^note (At least at the time, only one episode from a season was submitted for consideration when they were voting on the season as a whole. Members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences didn't watch shows such as Seinfeld, Friends, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer due to not being in those shows' target demographics, instead watching Law & Order and more obscure shows. Emmy winning streaks are common (The Amazing Race notably owned Best Reality TV Program for almost a decade after this book was published). The pay TV channels (HBO, Showtime) had an advantage over the main channels after the uproar over The Sopranos' getting snubbed by The Practice. Hofstede lobbed a Take That! to multi-Emmy winner John Lithgow in this article.)
16. Rampant Product Placement, particularly in televised sports ^note (This started with several college football games accepting sponsorship. The uproar over that did less than nothing to stop the trend from starting. Technically, the sponsors actually have to pay the teams/colleges to advertise, however, meaning money for university and sports programs. The Rose Bowl, instead of taking full sponsorship, instead uses a "The Rose Bowl, Presented by AT&T/Citi" tactic.)
17. William Shatner's notorious take on Elton John's "Rocket Man" at the 1977 Science Fiction Film Awards^note Shatner recited the lyrics instead of singing them, an approach he'd first tried for pop music material on his 1968 album The Transformed Man, which along with his patented Large Ham acting style and very cheesy video special effects to show three Shatners appearing at once made it the epitome of So Bad, It's Good. The clip of this became a pre-Web meme in The '90s, parodied by Chris Elliott on Late Night With David Letterman, Beck in his "Where It's At" video, and Stewie on Family Guy. This helped cement the stock parody trope of Shatner "singing" some popular song or another by speaking the lyrics.
18. Dateline's 1992 report on exploding General Motors trucks ^note (Said trucks supposedly exploded on impact due to their gas tanks, but after Dateline failed to produce an explosion they rigged one. This got NBC sued by GM, led to an exodus of Dateline staff plus news president Michael Gartner, and forced Dateline to issue an apology and nix the report. GM would later get sued themselves when one of the "sidesaddle" gas tanks accidentally killed a young boy, and they would discontinue the car using them.)
19. TV movies on Amy Fisher ^note (In Fall 1993, each of the Big Three rushed out a TV-movie based on the then-17-year-old Long Island girl who had an affair with a much older married man named Joey Buttafuoco and then shot his wife Mary Jo in the face when he told Fisher it was over. All three films aired within a week: NBC's take on the "Long Island Lolita" story, simply titled Amy Fisher: My Story (authorized by Fisher, with Noelle Parker in the role), aired first, while ABC (The Amy Fisher Story starring Drew Barrymore, based on a newspaper reporter's account of the crime) and CBS (Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story starring Alyssa Milano, authorized by the Buttafuocos) aired theirs' on the same night at the same time. The "Winter 1993" edition of Platypus Comix's The Ancient Lost Art of TV Guide Advertising features the TV Guide ads for all three movies.)
20. Supertrain ^note (1979 NBC series about a giant nuclear-powered train, meant to be their answer to The Love Boat. It was the most expensive pilot made up to that point, and when the series' concept did no good (no thanks to an allegedly butt-ugly set and costumes) it was removed from the schedule for a while and reworked into a thriller. This didn't help much, and NBC had to derail it for good shortly afterwards. Its flopping made NBC's already-problematic run under Fred Silverman worse.)
21. Life With Lucy ^note (1986 ABC sitcom starring Lucille Ball as the owner of a hardware store which, when it wasn't interminably boring, was putting Ball's safety into question every time the now-75-year-old actress had to do a stunt. Its failure caused Lucy to leave television for good.)
22. The Goddess of Love ^note (1988 NBC TV-movie and Non-Actor Vehicle invoked for Vanna White, which proved to the world that she should stick to her most famous role as eye candy on Wheel of Fortune.)
23. FOX After Breakfast ^note (Failed 1990s attempt at moving FX's well-received but seldom-seen Breakfast Time morning chat show to in front of a wider audience, only to get meddled into oblivion - to the point of meeting its end as The Vicki Lawrence Show. In fact, this book's foreword is written by one of its co-hosts, Tom Bergeron.)
24. Lost in Space episode "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" ^note (The next-to-last episode from 1968, about sentient plants attacking the Robinsons.)
25. Turn-On ^note (Notoriously-awful Hotter and Sexier counterpartinvoked to Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, from the same producers, that aired on most ABC affiliates in 1969, either in full or partially. It immediately earned backlash from affiliates such as Cleveland, who ripped the show from their airwaves in the middle and substituted it for other stuff such as an organ number (or just saying "the remainder of this broadcast will not be seen"), and a multitude of West Coast stations including Seattle refused to air it when word traveled to their side of the U.S. It was effectively canned before the first episode even finished airing. ABC made that cancellation official without comment the next day after Bristol-Myers withdrew their sponsorship and buried it as far as they could. This show subsequently turned off the careers of almost everyone involved with it with the major exceptions of Tim Conway (who was the guest host of the only aired episode) and cast members Teresa Graves (who ended up on Laugh-In itself), Chuck McCann (who became a prolific animation voice actor) and Hamilton Camp, who had a long career as a character actor and voice actor, though he'd end up appearing in two more shows that got canceled after a single episode, the 1979 flops Co-ed Fever and McGurk: A Dog's Life)
26. The Magic Hour ^note (Basketball legend Magic Johnson trying, and failing miserably, as a talk show host in 1998.)
27. St. Elsewhere's All Just a Vision in an Autistic Kid's Mind ending ^note (The final scene of the 1988 Grand Finale cut from the hospital to Tommy Westphall, a child with autism, holding a snowglobe with a replica of the hospital inside it, seemingly suggesting that the entire series had been a product of his imagination. Surprisingly, the WMG that all the other shows that cross-pollinated with Elsewhere also exist in the boy's mind barely comes up.)
28. The $1.98 Beauty Show ^note (1978-80 syndicated mock talent competition cast in the same vein as creator Chuck Barris' earlier The Gong Show, only with mostly-ugly women on parade instead of bizarre and marginally-talented men and women. This added an extra nail to Barris' coffin, seeing as how the show was ejected from the airwaves alongside another list entry, 3's a Crowd, taking The Newlywed Game, The Dating Game, and The Gong Show with it.)
29. Cop Rock ^note (1990 ABC series that turned off many viewers with its combination of serious police drama and upbeat musical numbers.)
30. Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell ^note (Ill-fated 1975-76 ABC Variety Show hosted by the infamous sports broadcaster. Not to be confused with the more popular Saturday Night Live on NBC, though the Cosell SNL is the reason why the NBC show was officially named NBC's Saturday Night until March 1977 and is the impetus behind the show's famous line "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!")invoked
31. The epilogue of Michael Jackson's 1991 "Black or White" music video ^note (In which Jackson smashes up a car and engages in an absurd amount of crotch-grabbing even by his usual standards, to the shock of millions of viewers - including kids and their parents - who watched its simulcast on four American networks: FOX, MTV, VH1, and BET. This part of the video is really a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment that doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the song, the song and video's narrative had already ended so what viewers saw was MJ trashing a car and "dancing" in silence, eventually followed by a Proscenium Reveal that the video was being watched by Bart Simpson just in time for Homer to walk in, yell at Bart, and shut off the TV. It was excluded from future showings and on iTunes. This was cited by the author as the point where Jackson's life and career went tragically downhill, ultimately ending with his death in 2009, five years after this book was published.)
32. Dynasty replacing Pamela Sue Martin with Emma Samms as Fallon Carrington (beginning April 1985)
33. Pink Lady and Jeff ^note (1980 variety show which surrealistically paired a Japanese female pop duo who spoke no English and learned all their lines phonetically with an obscure comedian whose main qualification for being there was that he was already on NBC's payroll. Not helping was the fact that the producers refused to let the girls sing their own songs and forced them to cover American disco hits. The show's failure is considered to be the final nail in the coffin for the Variety Show format - this is also one of the many entries in the book to mention Fred Silverman.)
34. Twin Peaks' second season ^note (Studio execs forced the show to resolve the Laura Palmer storyline, despite the fact that it was the driving force of the series and wasn't meant to be resolved (though it likely would've been resolved if the show had been cancelled first); the reveal resulted in the subplots being all there was left. The 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me finished the job on the franchise and it would take two decades for any talks of revivals to materialize. However, that revival - a third season aired in 2017 - is widely considered to have redeemed both the second season and the film in the eyes of many critics.)
35. Drudge ^note (1998-99 Fox News Channel show starring conservative journalist Matt Drudge, known for his Drudge Report website, which was canned after the network refused to let him show a picture of a fetus.)
36. Moonlighting's poor handling of Dave and Maddie as a couple
37. Chuck Cunningham's disappearance on Happy Days
38. Colby losing to Tina on Survivor: Outback (2001) ^note (Colby brought Tina with him to the Final Tribal Council over Keith, whom he probably would've beaten easily. Colby was derided at Council for this decision. It's also worth noting that both Colby and Tina claimed in later interviews that the two of them had hatched an alliance early on and agreed that if they both made the Final Three, they would oust the third contestant, thus ensuring a victory for one of them.)
39. CBS' many failed attempts at morning shows (Morning Show, Calendar, The Morning Program)^note (With Today on NBC and Good Morning America on ABC both being established hits, CBS has long struggled to compete in the morning slot. The biggest fiasco was The Morning Program, which debuted in January of 1987 and didn't even last a full year. An awkward attempt to mix news and entertainment, with actress Mariette Hartley as co-host and a pre-Full House Bob Saget as a comedic announcer, the show was widely panned by critics and limped along with minimal ratings. The struggles continued even after the book was published, with the fairly stable CBS This Morning debuting in 2012, getting thrown into chaos six years later when co-host Charlie Rose resigned amid sexual harassment allegations, and CBS Mornings {a tie-in to the long-running, arts-oriented CBS News Sunday Morning} being launched in its place in 2021.)
40. The Dana Carvey Show and how ABC screwed it over (1996) ^note (The sketch show - which featured a writing team of soon-to-be-very-famous comedians and screenwriters like Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Louis C.K. and Charlie Kaufman - was canned in part because ABC decided to air it after Home Improvement, and the sketches' offbeat and often-racy content was a bad match-up with the family sitcom. This resulted in controversies and low ratings which doomed the show to cancellation after just eight episodes.)
41. Several TV versions of films, including a Casablanca adaptation (1983) with David Soul as Rick Blaine ^note (Héctor Elizondo was another cast member of the Casablanca adaptation, and he actually appeared in a good number of the shows in this specific article.)
42. Burger King's "Where's Herb?" commercials ^note (1985-86 commercial campaign prompting people to find "Herb", the only person in the world who has never eaten the chain's signature Whopper. This campaign was meant to run for a year, but BK was forced to euthanize it after just four months due to some controversial confrontations at Burger King locations by people trying to find "Herb", who was initially not described by the restaurant, and other unfortunate incidents.)
43. Small Wonder ^note (Infamous 1985-89 sitcom about a robotics engineer who creates a daughter named Vicki.)
44. The Dukes of Hazzard replacing Bo and Luke with Coy and Vance (1982-83) ^note (Contract disputes forced Bo and Luke's actors out of the program. When the ratings started to tank, those disputes were settled and the original actors returned, while Coy and Vance got put on the bus that brought Bo and Luke back. Hofstede had previously written a book about Dukes, so he had some extra insight into the situation.)
45. Fish Police ^note (One of many early-1990s attempts by the Big Three to cash in on FOX's success with The Simpsons. Fish Police was CBS and Hanna-Barbera's stab at the formula; it, NBC's Family Dog, and ABC's Capitol Critters all got canned due to low ratings, bad reviews, and Executive Meddling. Fish Police animated six episodes, but only got half of them in before it got "hooked" off the schedule, becoming an embarrassment for the creator of the comic book the show was based on, Steve Moncuse.)
46. The Reagans ^note (Showtime TV movie on Ronald Reagan which was viewed as a total hatchet job despite claims it wasn't from the movie's producer. It was supposed to air on corporate sibling CBS, but they decided it was too much of a hot potato. Bonus points for it airing only months before Reagan's death from Alzheimer's.)
47. Cousin Oliver joins The Brady Bunch for its final six episodes
48. The XFL ^note (A Totally Radical, up to eleven attempt at a new football league, founded by NBC and Vince McMahon...which proved to be a sloppy, crude, ham-fisted, short-lived embarrassment. The Las Vegas Outlaws vs. Orlando Rage game in the sixth week was infamous for its blatant ratings stunt of a televised halftime segment where a cameraman named Bruno was hyped up to be sent into the Rage Cheerleaders' locker room, only for Bruno to get knocked out before he could enter. Still, the XFL would return in 2020, this time moving away from the gimmicks and focusing on re-imagining the rules of football with completely new teams. Unfortunately, despite the better reception the second time around, its second run got cut and later cancelled prematurely due to the COVID-19 Pandemic over a month after its reintroduction, leading to the company filing for bankruptcy. It was eventually bought for $15 million by Dwayne Johnson, who promoted the original incarnation of the league (though it features the return of the first revival XFL teams alongside a planned farm system for itself), and its third attempt was launched in 2023.)
49. The 1960s TV rule against showing navels on women (affecting such shows as Gidget, Gilligan's Island, and I Dream of Jeannie)
50. Thicke of the Night ^note (Heavily-promoted but poorly-received talk show starring Alan Thicke. It was also meant to be a comeback vehicle for Fred Silverman, who'd been fired from NBC for his very poor performance there, which created two of the other entries on this list.)
51. Shelley Hack taking over for Kate Jackson on Charlie's Angels ^note (The TV commercial actress was chosen over Barbara Bach, but her poor acting eventually doomed the show. She was replaced by Tanya Roberts for the show's final season.)
52. The 61st Academy Awards telecast ^note (The 1989 show, featuring an awkward and poorly-received Snow White opening number with Rob Lowe playing the Disney-style Snow's blind date - the whole thing ultimately killed off the career of producer Allan Carr (who was coming off a series of movie flops that started with 1980s disco-killer Can't Stop the Music) and got the Oscars sued by Disney for the embarrassing portrayal of Snow White. It got so bad that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences apologized for the performance and dismissed Carr, replacing him with Gil Cates for the 1990 telecast. The actress who played Snow White in the show, Eileen Bowman, was effectively ejected from Hollywood and any chance of being associated with Disney as a result as well - she had to sign a gag order the morning after the show and was not allowed to talk about it for years. There was also a policy change to change "The winner is" to "The Oscar goes to". It was changed back a decade later.)
53. Dan Rather using "Courage" as his signoff on the CBS Evening News ^note (For one week in September 1985, Rather signed off this way due to problems at CBS, but it failed to have the desired effect and was seen as uncharacteristically insincere. After CBS fired him following the Killian Documents scandal in 2004, he signed off this way for his final CBS Evening News broadcast just for the hell of it.)
54. The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer ^note (UPN sitcom which attempted to use the Abraham Lincoln White House as the setting for a bawdy sex comedy mocking the Bill Clinton administration. It should be noted that the author acknowledges that while Pfeiffer isn't a great show by any stretch of the imagination, its placement on this list has more to do with the misguided protests from Moral Guardians over nonexistent jokes about slavery than it does the show itself.)
55. NBC's Fall 1983 schedule ^note (In a network prime time first, all of the shows NBC debuted that fall ended up getting canceled before the season was over. The huge list of flops included Manimal (which David Letterman ruthlessly mocked), Mr. Smith (about a talking orangutan with a genius-level IQ), Boone (about a kid whose parents are trying to convince him to give up his rock dreams to run their family gas station), Jennifer Slept Here (a family moves into the house of a legendary late sex symbol, which is haunted by her ghost, but only their teenage son can see and interact with her), The Bay City Blues (a pre-Bull Durham minor league baseball saga), For Love and Honor (a Spiritual Adaptation of An Officer and a Gentleman), The Rousters (a Bounty Hunter family), We Got it Made (two bachelor roommates hire a sexy maid) and The Yellow Rose (a Dallas wannabe starring a pre-Moonlighting Cybill Shepherd). Those last two at least managed to finish out their seasons before they got axed, and they both got unlikely revivals years later—We Got it Made got a belated second season in First-Run Syndication in 1987-88, while NBC reran The Yellow Rose in the summer of 1990. The whole fiasco added an extra nail to now-ex president Fred Silverman's coffin, but NBC finally recovered by the end of the decade.)
56. The Brothers Grunt ^note (MTV's replacement cartoon for Beavis and Butt-Head while the latter was being edited for content following complaints about kids imitating the dangerous stunts, such as setting things on fire, putting dogs in washing machines, huffing oven gas, and hurling bowling balls off bridges.)
57. NBC failing to let David Letterman use the names of his NBC-era segments on CBS' Late Show ^note (A potential media circus around a possible trial over the rights to the segments, including possible ridicule from Jay Leno and Letterman, and the sheer stupidity of NBC claiming things like Stupid Pet Tricks to be "intellectual property" finally convinced NBC to back off. Judge Wapner of The People's Court is quoted in this article.)
58. The New Monkees ^note (Attempted revival of The Monkees concept during their return to popularity that didn't even come close to repeating the success or notability of the original, on top of getting the producers sued by the original Monkees. This "new" series and franchise was obviously meant to go on for a while, but the accompanying album completely bombed (not even making the charts), while the First-Run Syndication series generally aired on low-powered independent stations and/or in late night weekend timeslots. After 13 episodes the curtain was forcibly dropped on the show early.)
59. Dusty's Trail ^note (Gilligan's Island IN THE OLD WEST!, even down to starring Bob Denver.)
60. The Wilton North Report ^note (FOX's 1987 replacement for The Late Show, a magazine show combining news, comedy and music; picture a blander version of The Daily Show in The '80s. It lasted a mere four weeks. Ended the careers of the producer and hosts involved, and the show's greenlighting cost FOX Arsenio Hall, who didn't return when The Late Show began rebroadcasting. He was eventually replaced by future Match Game host Ross Schafer, and The Late Show never recovered from this move, eventually being replaced by The Chevy Chase Show, another list entry, which was the final blow to FOX's late-night talk show attempts. Conan O'Brien was one of the writers.)
61. Dark Shadows' "Leviathan" storyline ^note (Poorly-received 1969-70 storyline involving Barnabas being under the spell of the title Leviathans and producing a mystery box.)
62. WWF Raw's Mark Henry/Mae Young storyline ^note (Which involved, among other things, an 80-year-old woman getting pregnant and giving birth after only three months...to a hand.)
63. Land of the Lost (1974)'s third season ^note (Rick being Put on a Bus, from a place which supposedly had no way out.)
64. Madonna's "Like a Prayer" music video debut ^note (The video, partly sponsored by Pepsi, was hugely hyped, but its provocative imagery condemning racism and religious hypocrisy, along with Madonna's usual sexual themes, with depictions of things like burning crosses and a fantasy sequence where Madonna makes out with a Black saint—sometimes mistakenly interpreted as a black Jesus Christ—was taken by Moral Guardians to be blasphemous and racist, and their protests cost her the endorsement deal, although she kept the money that Pepsi had paid for an ad that used a variant of "Like a Prayer". Despite the controversy, the song and its video became a big hit anyway, hitting number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Pepsi would find themselves in a similar incident years later with rapper Ludacris, who was then replaced by Ozzy Osbourne, which didn't help the situation.)
65. Joanie Loves Chachi ^note (Spinoff of Happy Days with the title characters moving to Chicago and starting a rock band, complete with song performances. It only lasted 17 episodes, and both characters quietly returned to Happy Days in the aftermath.)
66. Roger Ramjet and Underdog both getting bashed by Moral Guardians due to allegations of drug abuse
67. Days of Our Lives deals with the Devil ^note (1994-95 plot involving the Demonic Possession of beloved town psychiatrist Marlena Evans, highlighted by scenes of her levitating. The fairly grounded Days suddenly going the Supernatural Soap Opera route and the protracted length of the storyline, lasting almost six months, strongly divided fans. But it helped boost the show's ratings, and outlandish plots dominated for the next couple of decades, most infamously with a 2004 storyline in which characters were kidnapped and taken to an island set up as an exact dupilcate of their hometown of Salem. The possession storyline has since been Vindicated by History, and even received a sequel in 2021.)
68. Attempts to Americanize Fawlty Towers ^note (The book covers Amanda's, which ran 10 episodes in 1983, featuring a Gender Flip in casting Bea Arthur as Basil's counterpart, along with an Italian Manuel Expy played by Tony Rosato, plus Payne, which ran 9 episodes in 1999, with John Larroquette as Royal Payne and an Indian Manuel Expy. Both shows took place at a California seaside inn. There was also a third attempt to remake Fawlty Towers, 1978's Snavely, a pilot that didn't get picked up despite having Harvey Korman and Betty White in the lead roles.)
69. The erasure of countless TV showsinvoked ^note (Two of the shows mentioned as being erased were Johnny Carson's first Tonight Show and Super Bowl I. The latter was recorded by both NBC and CBS, but was erased for cost-cutting reasons - this being before the notion of saving the tapes really took off. The NFL was eventually able to remove Super Bowl I from the Missing Episode pit at last when, to commemorate the Super Bowl's 50th Anniversary in 2016, they scraped together enough footage to show that first game on TV again.)
70. The Chevy Chase Show ^note (FOX's notoriously-awful entry into the Late-Night Talk Show War of 1993, which only lasted five weeks and cost FOX $3 million in a guarantee they made with Chevy Chase. This was their first attempt at a late-night talk show since The Wilton North Report, which is also on the list, died and took The Late Show with it, and Chase's failure, which was lampshaded by one of his guests, was the final nail in the coffin. FOX waited over a decade until they tried again with the genre, ultimately producing Talkshow with Spike Feresten, which itself lasted three seasons.)
71. Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Spock's Brain" ^note (Season 3 episode where Spock loses his brain, generally regarded as one of the worst episodes of TOS. NBC was losing interest in Star Trek by this point, and canned the series at the end of this particular season. It would be revived by Paramount a decade later as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the franchise has mostly thrived since then.)
72. Shows with talking babies (Happy, Baby Talk, and Baby Bob)
73. Roseanne Barr butchering the National Anthem at a San Diego Padres game in 1990 ^note (This even got her scorn from then-President George H. W. Bush, who called her performance "a disgrace." She was mocked for her notoriously bad warbling of the National Anthem for a while, not to mention her crotch-grabbing which was considered disrespectful.)
74. Nick @ Nite's Network Decay ^note (More recent shows from the 1980s-90s replaced the classic 1950s-60s shows like I Love Lucy and The Patty Duke Show. Most of these classic shows moved to fellow Viacom channel TV Land, which was actually created as "Nick at Nite's TV Land", indicating the intention of moving to said channel eventually.)
75. The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island ^note (From 1981, the last and least of three reunion TV-movies for the Gilligan's Island cast. Its failure caused plans for a fourth movie, Murder on Gilligan's Island, to be scrapped.)
76. Paul Lynde as a bachelor on The Dating Game ^note (Sadly, this wasn't the show being progressive, or even having him select a male on behalf of a young lady as was sometimes done (two examples being Don Rickles in 1967 and Dick Clark in 1973) - this was a standard game with Paul being one of the bachelorette's possible choices.)
77. Harold Robbins' The Survivors ^note (High-budget ABC soap opera dud from 1969, starring George Hamilton and Lana Turner.)
78. Janet Jackson's Wardrobe Malfunction at Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston ^note (Freakout by Moral Guardians, which included the NFL and Viacom/MTV/CBS finding themselves in legal crosshairs, led to a massive crackdown by the FCC on "inappropriateness" and ever-increasing fines, which led to the FCC getting hauled before the Supreme Court. The malfunction also didn't exactly help out Jackson or *NSYNC veteran Justin Timberlake, who helped force the moment, with Jackson getting uninvited from the Grammys. This was the newest moment in the book, with the incident having happened earlier in the year it was published and being added at the last moment in this position; a note at the end warned if this had a much harsher "quiz show scandal"-level impact, it would be advised to move it to the top 10.)
79. Bewitched recycling scripts after The Other Darrin takes over. ^note (The list of recycled scripts includes one for the show's finale.)
80. The Flying Nun ^note (Classically-bad vehicle for Sally Field after Gidget was cancelled. The show ran three seasons before Field got herself pregnant to get out of the show. The Flying Nun haunted her career for a long time.)
81. Woops! episode "Say It Ain't So, Santa" ^note (The bizarre Christmas episode of an already bizarre, short-lived FOX sitcom centered on apocalypse survivors, and the last episode of said sitcom to actually air. Controversy over the portrayal of Santa having "accidentally" killed Mrs. Claus and the elves led to Fox/Touchstone nuking the series from the airwaves during the Christmas break, leaving three other episodes to never see the light of day.)
82. Battle of the Network Stars #18 ^note (Sports competition among stars on the Big Three's shows which, in 1985, made a disastrous move to Mexico with Dick Van Dyke taking over as emcee. This move doomed the biannual competition, which had a three-year hiatus before ABC held one last event that reinstated Howard Cosell as host and returned the competition to California. 29 years after that, ABC announced a revival of the competition, this time as a 10-episode limited series featuring stars from many different networks, which aired in Summer 2017; NBC had tried - and sadly failed - to revive it in 2003, though their iteration only featured their stars.)
83. Me and the Chimp ^note (CBS series where Ted Bessell, a familiar face from playing the likable Donald Hollinger on That Girl, starred as a dentist raising a chimpanzee. This proved to be a Star-Derailing Role for Bessell, as he received the blame for the show failing. He spent the rest of his career as a character actor and director.)
84. ABC's 1974 Wonder Woman TV-movie ^note (Pilot for an intended series featuring Cathy Lee Crosby as a blonde, (mostly) non-powered Wonder Woman, based upon a period in the comics when Diana had given up her superpowers and instead learned martial arts to work as a Charlie's Angels-esque crimefighter, though by the time it aired Wonder Woman had become a superhero again in the comics. It was not well-received and DC did a second TV movie the next year that replaced Crosby with Lynda Carter that was more in tune with the original comic book character and eventually became a series.)
85. Connie Francis performing poorly as a celebrity partner on The $10,000 Pyramid ^note (She failed to win a single game that week against Pyramid vet Nipsey Russell, and faded back into the woodwork for a year. Not surprisingly, she never appeared on another game show.)
86. Elvis Presley being shot only from the waist up (due to Standards & Practices rules at the time that found Elvis' swiveling hip dances to be too risqué) on The Ed Sullivan Show
87. Recycled In Space cartoons (Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space, Partridge Family 2200 AD, Yogi's Space Race, and Gilligans Planet)
88. Laverne & Shirley writing Shirley out of the show
89. QVC selling the Poopin' Moose ^note (A novelty toy which "pooped" candy. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, it was a best-seller and inspired a full line of these toys with other animals until their manufacturer closed its doors in 2003.)
90. Bad Ronald ^note (1974 ABC TV-movie which features an extremely nerdy teen with No Social Skills hiding in his house after killing a peer by accident. After his mother dies, he remains hidden and a new family buys the house, resulting in Ronald becoming fixated on their youngest daughter. Was quoted as "processed cheese" by the author, reportedly had a murky color quality to it when it was aired, and also had reportedly not aged well.)
91. USA Network Up All Night ^note (Nine-year network block that specialized in airing titillating and gory movies with all the titillation and gore censored, leaving only dull scripts and bad acting. Probably most famous nowadays through Duckman's mocking of the block and USA Network at the time.)
92. The Aldrich Family's chronic case of The Other Darrin ^note (Only one of the original actors {House Jameson, who played the father}, remained with the program throughout its four seasons; there were an obscene amount of recasts for the other characters.)
93. The Dick Van Dyke Show episode "The Bad Old Days" ^note (The one with an awkward and uncharacteristically misogynistic dream sequence; Dick Van Dyke cites this as the worst episode of the program, and the writers of said episode never returned to the show.)
94. 3's A Crowd ^note (Short-lived 1979-80 syndicated game show that asked embarrassingly probing questions of men, and sought to see whether their wives or secretaries knew them better. The backlash took down all of Chuck Barris' games that were airing that season, he spent the next year in seclusion, and his career never fully recovered before his passing in 2017. Stunningly, 3's A Crowd was revived on GSN in 1999, though with mothers, sisters, and best friends in lieu of secretaries. Not to be confused with the Three's Company spinoff, which could have been considered for the list, too.)
95. The Western saturating television with 30 shows on the schedules of the Big Three in the late 1950s. ^note (The overabundance of Westerns on the networks, which included the classics Gunsmoke and Bonanza and a few Friday duds (one of which had a gun-toting insurance salesman), got satirized on Tex Avery's Thing of Tomorrow MGM cartoons (especially TV of Tomorrow), and by the time Gunsmoke and Bonanza ended their runs in the 70's, it left the genre virtually dead on television, plus it was already running over bumps in the theaters. Hofstede lobbed a Take That! to the Reality genre in this article, noting it also was being oversaturated on TV when this book was published.)
96. Quark ^note (Star Trek parody that spoofed other Sci-Fi shows later; was well-received critically and promoted well, but that didn't translate into ratings at all, resulting in it being canned after about 6-7 episodes.)
97. Farrah Fawcett's awkward interview on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1997 ^note (Fawcett appeared extremely distracted and rather disoriented, leading to speculation that she was under the influence of drugs.)
98. The addition of Dawninvoked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Connor on Angel ^note The former was a disliked character for being annoying and for her intended sacrifice at the end of that season not taking place; after her introduction, Buffy's days ended up being numbered, with the series from Dawn on not being as widely regarded as the first three seasons. Connor, in addition to being annoying, was also a malicious Antagonistic Offspring of the titular character who did things that eventually reached Squick; he made it through two seasons before the production wiped his memory altogether, but the damage was done and the show only did one more season after he was removed from the cast (the book doesn't directly mention this, but the eventual removal of Connor from the cast was pretty much the reverse of Dawn's introduction). While Hofstede didn't fault the actors (Nickelodeon alumna Michelle Trachtenberg and actor Vincent Kartheiser), the roles still hammered their careers (Kartheiser would get into AMC's Mad Men eventually). Angel showrunner David Greenwalt, who is not named in the book, would get caught in the Creator's Pet Scrappy pit a second time with Adalind Schade on Grimm about a decade after this book was published.
99. AMC "going commercial" ^note (The channel was originally known as American Movie Classics before unmentioned competition from Turner Classic Movies/TCM convinced the channel to go a different direction. Despite its inclusion here, the move was Vindicated by History, as AMC would go on to air three extremely successful and influential shows—Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead—after this book was published.)
100. Professor Price ^note (Ugly, awkward pricing game on The Price Is Right that involved trivia which was only played twice in November 1977 before "disappearing deep into the CBS vault of bad ideas".)

Honorable mentions

1. Saturday Night Live's sixth season (1980-81), produced by Jean Doumanian (and then Dick Ebersol for one episode after Doumanian and 90% of her cast were fired), which helped end Fred Silverman's tumultuous run at NBC.
2. Boohbah ^note (Very trippy kids' show from the creators of Teletubbies.)
3. Are You Hot?: The Search for America's Sexiest People ^note (Early-2000s reality show in which people were picked apart for their looks; cited as yet another reason why the Middle East and North Korea want to destroy America.)
4. The Tortellis ^note (One-season Cheers spinoff centered on Nick and Loretta Tortelli's family.)
5. Batman (1966) often casting Batgirl as the Damsel in Distress
6. The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast of Peter Marshall ^note (This was noted as when the Roasts Jumped the Shark invoked by apparently running out of A-list actors.)
7. Santo Gold infomercials ^note (Mind Screw jewelry infomercials featuring footage from the sci-fi and professional wrestling film Santo Gold's Blood Circus; the creator of both the film and the jewelry was later jailed for mail fraud.)
8. Jabberjaw ^note (Uninspired re-tread of Scooby-Doo, featuring a giant anthropomorphic shark in place of Scooby, and a travelling rock band in place of the Mystery Gang. Created in a rush to cash in on the public fascination with sharks after the success of the movie Jaws.)
9. The Morton Downey Jr. Show ^note (Early "trash" talk show featuring, among other things, the host holding screaming matches with the audience and blowing cigarette smoke in guests' faces.)
10. Revenge of the Nerds III and IV, and Problem Child III ^note (Several cases of Sequelitis of forgettable films.)
11. Playing It Straight ^note (2004 FOX reality show in which women spend time on a ranch with various men, and try to figure out which ones are gay or straight.)
12. It's About Time ^note (A 60s sitcom about cave people in the modern world; yes, the idea for Cavemen is Older Than They Think.)
13. Rudolph's Shiny New Year ^note (Sequel to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964).)
14. MTV's infamous Network Decay.
15. The New Leave It to Beaver ^note A 1980s sequel show to the iconic 1950s sitcom. Despite middling ratings and little attention, the show somehow lasted four seasons and over 100 episodes. Despite the length of its run, the show is not very well remembered or liked.
16. CBS bleeping Janet Jackson saying "Jesus" on The Late Show with David Letterman
17. USA Today: The Television Show
18. James Stockdale's 1992 vice presidential debate ^note (In which the Naval admiral, then Ross Perot's running mate, appeared extremely disoriented, leading to a "Gridlock!" meme for a while, including on Saturday Night Live.)
19. Frank Zappa hosting Saturday Night Live ^note (Zappa and the cast did not get along, and Zappa made no attempt to conceal the fact that he wasn't enjoying himself. His performance featured lots of mugging and reading from cue cards.)
20. The Love Boat Follies ^note (Two-hour singing special featuring the Love Boat cast and musical stars.)
21. Playboy's 50th-Anniversary Celebration
22. Baywatch Nights ^note (Baywatch spinoff which took a turn for sci-fi in Season 2.)
23. She's the Sheriff ^note (Sitcom starring Suzanne Somers as a single mother/cop.)
24. After M*A*S*H
25. The Lingerie Bowl ^note (Bowl game for the all-women Legends Football League.)

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Tropes in this book:

• All Just a Dream: Entries 27 (St. Elsewhere) and 2 (Dallas) are derided as misuses of this trope.
• Award Snub:invoked Entry 15 discusses how the Emmys are horribly broken.
• Book Ends: Entries 100 (the Professor Price game from The Price Is Right) and 1 (The Star Wars Holiday Special) were both aired on CBS, bookending the list. Both entries also happened within 12 months of each other toward the end of the 70's.
• Bowdlerization: Entry 91 is based around USA Up All Night doing this for B-movies from The '80s, though Hofstede doesn't really try to address the possible counterpoints that USA gave the movies mainstream exposure that they wouldn't get otherwise, or that the movies could be perfectly enjoyable for their Camp value even without the more titillating parts. He basically admits that his main complaint is that he wasn't getting the goods when he watched the show as a Hormone-Addled Teenager.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Entry 37 is about the Trope Namer.
• Cousin Oliver: Entry 47 is on the Trope Namer himself, while Entry 98 discusses the trope in the Buffyverse. It's noted that Oliver himself isn't actually ungodly annoying like his reputation would suggest, but rather that the writers themselves seemed to have complete apathy to him, with the few episodes after his arrival giving him nothing to do and shoving in the audience's faces how pointless he was.
• Creator Provincialism: Because the book focuses on American television, it does leave out some of the most infamous television events in other parts of the world, including :
  • Heil Honey I'm Home!, a British sitcom about Adolf Hitler that only lasted one episode.
  • Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos, a take on the America's Funniest Home Videos formula that aired on Nine Network and primarily featured animals having sex. It was pulled off the network in the middle of its only airing at the demand of the network's owner Kerry Packer, leading to the people who made/helmed the show being very acrimoniously fired right away and trespassed from the network.
  • The Pokémon: The Series episode "Electric Soldier Porygon", which was never exported beyond the show's native Japan and was outright banned by the Japanese government because it contained strobing visuals that caused an epidemic of epilectic seizures during its only airing and led to new Japanese television practices that are still in effect to this day.
  • Much like the American counterpart, the countless erasure of multiple episodes from British TV shows, most notoriously episodes from Doctor Who.
  • And while we're on the subject of Doctor Who, its initial cancellation before its hiatus of nearly 15 years (during the time this book was published) deserves a dishonorable mention.
  • The Trouble with Tracy, a 1970s Canadian sitcom that was created solely to fulfill the then-financially struggling CTV's quota on locally produced content, with the producers required to film 130 episodes in a single season. The time and economic pressures involved forced them to take shortcuts such as recycling 25 year old radio scripts, shooting whole scenes in a single take, using canned laughter instead of a live studio audience, keeping flubbed lines in the completed episodes due to having insufficient time to shoot retakes, and shooting virtually the entire series inside a poorly-constructed set. The end result was regarded as one of the most poorly-produced sitcoms ever made.
  • Hilfe, meine Familie spinnt^note "Help, My Family is Crazy", a German remake of Married... with Children that attempted to recreate the source material frame by frame, down to the looks and gestures of the cast, with virtually no attempt made to adjust the humor or plots to their new cultural surroundings. Its poor audience reception was not helped by its occasional translation issues or the fact that the original had already been exported the year prior to great success and even aired on the same network.
• Executive Meddling:invoked
  • Referenced in entry 23, on FOX After Breakfast - "A gaggle of new producers micromanaged every aspect of the show, certain they knew what worked on the network better than the original cast and creative team."
  • Entry 47, The Brady Bunch's Cousin Oliver, also invokes this, noting it was ABC who insisted that Sherwood Schwartz introduce a cute younger character to the show to counter-balance the rapidly-aging original Brady kids.
• Jumping the Shark:invoked Twin Peaks' second season is cited as an example in entry 34. Interestingly, the trope-naming Happy Days episode doesn't make the list. ^note (The reason most likely being that while Happy Days had been declining in quality for a while and the Shark Jump was merely an indicator of how far the show had sunk, Twin Peaks was a strong show which got suddenly derailed. Happy Days' Jumping the Shark moment is mentioned in the book, however.)
• Missing Episode:invoked The focus of entry 69.
• Network Decay: Examples are cited for AMC (see the YMMV tab) and Nick @ Nite.
• The Other Darrin:invoked Entries 92, 51, and 32 are about this on The Aldrich Family, Charlie's Angels, and Dynasty (1981) respectively. Entry 79 is about the Trope Namer himself, at least in a roundabout way; see Recycled Script below.
• Product Placement: Entry 16 laments the increased appearance of it in society as a whole.
• "Rashomon"-Style: Entry 19 cites ABC, CBS, and NBC rushing to create a TV movie on Amy Fisher as a Real Life example of this, outright mentioning Rashomon by name and even asking the reader to watch it when "you're at the video store and they're all out of Happy Gilmore". Hofstede finds NBC's take (Amy Fisher: My Story, based on her autobiography) sympathetic to Fisher and well-acted but boring; CBS's (Casualties of Love, starring Alyssa Milano) more sympathetic to the Buttafuocos; and ABC's (The Amy Fisher Story, starring Drew Barrymore) as the most even-handed but also most lurid, but still shames all three networks for their desires to try and outdo each other on such a subject.
• Recycled Script:invoked Entry 79 calls out Bewitched on this.
• The Scrappy:invoked Entry 7 is on the Trope Namer. Dawn and Connor from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel also get a spot, noting that they were both able to be rescued to some extent but the damage was already done.
• Self-Deprecation: The foreword was written by Tom Bergeron, who openly expresses his personal embarrassment (FOX After Breakfast).
• Shipping Bed Death:invoked Entry 36 highlights the notorious example on Moonlighting.
• Transatlantic Equivalent: Entry 68 is about two ill-conceived attempts to do an American adaptation of Fawlty Towers, a show that many people would consider a Tough Act to Follow, and a show rooted in very English sensibilities.
• Variety Show: Entries 33, 30 and 11 deal with cases where networks tried to launch these as vehicles for very unlikely hosts (a Japanese pop duo with a limited grasp of English, a sportscaster known for his deadpan style and Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, and the cast of a family sitcom hosting in-character), only to have them fail and damage the entire genre in the process. Entry 1 is about an attempt to shoehorn the world of a very expensive Space Opera into a Variety Show special, with disastrous results.
• Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: Hofstede has a tendency to use "it's" where he should be using "its".
• Writer on Board: While any book like this is going to be very subjective and tilted toward the biases of the author, a number of entries are Hofstede complaining about things he personally doesn't like, rather than moments that were widely regarded by viewers as horrible.

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